Supporting Nav4 makes your app less durable.
[ Posted by Dan on November 05, 2002 | 1 Comments ]

About two years ago I began adding a line to the Functional Requirements Documents I was writing that said something like...

Supporting Netscape Navigator 4.x represents a technical and business risk to the success of the Business Plan.

The reason I would add this is that double coding JavaScript routines, or using wrapper functions, represented a doubling in development time, resulting in increased costs to the client and a extended delivery times. Time is money.

This morning, I realized that my warning can and should contain another comment...

Supporting Netscape Navigator 4.x (Nav4) represents a technical and business risk to the success of the Business Plan. Implementing support for Nav4 will decrease the durability of the application be increasing the amount of code to maintain and the complexity of that code, for a browser that is rapidly falling off the browsing landscape.

Unfortunately, I still get projects where the question "who is the user base?" gets answered with, "Solaris users with Nav4." I'm at the point in my front end development career that those words anger me.

 

		My last job was with a university and I was always shocked and infuriated by the fact that 90% of the professors were on Nav4. Not only were they using it, they were absolutely convinced it was THE superior web browser. Nav4 is going to be with us for at least another 85 years, I am sure of it. -Posted by Josh on November 5, 2002 12:05 PM

Comment posting has been turned off because I don't have enough time and will to deal with the constant comment spamming. I'm very sorry and will fix this sometime soon (soon = before 2004 ends).