The Demise of Netscape Navigator

An article entitled In praise of … Netscape Navigator announced  that today (Saturday, 1 March 2008) sees the official end of support for the Netscape Navigator Web browser.

The “In praise of” column does indeed praise Netscape for “opening the web, [and] pav[ing] the way for everything from Google to Wikipedia“.

What the column doesn’t say is the that the browser went from strength to strength after it was launched by ignoring standards bodies and introducing several new proprietary HTML extensions which infuriated HTML standards groups when they were released. As an article in Wikipedia describes:

Through the late 1990s, Netscape made sure that Navigator remained the technical leader among web browsers. Important new features included cookies, frames, and JavaScript (in version 2.0). Although those and other innovations eventually became open standards of the W3C and ECMA and were emulated by other browsers, they were often viewed as controversial. Netscape, according to critics, was more interested in bending the web to its own de facto “standards” (bypassing standards committees and thus marginalizing the commercial competition) than it was in fixing bugs in its products. Consumer rights advocates were particularly critical of cookies and of commercial web sites using them to invade individual privacy.

But why is the Guardian praising Netscape, if the company behaved in this fashion? Well I think the Guardian was right when it says that “Everyone from secretaries to salesmen started logging on” thanks to the initial success an popularity of the browser.  But let’s not rewrite history and suggest that this was due to the software vendor supporting old standards - rather, and ironically, its success was due to flouting the standisation processes and forcing innovations (which, in some cases, subsequently became standardised) through seeking to position itself as the dominant vendor in the marketplace.

Of course, although they were the dominant player for a short period, this did not last, with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser eventually finding itself as the world’s most widely-used browser, despite the appeal which FireFox has to its admirers.

Strange how  things turn out.

Firefox Use In UK Is Near The Bottom Of The League

Via a post on Seb Schmoller’s blog I came across an XiTi Monitor article which gives statistical data on usage of FireFox across Europe.

The news isn’t good for use supporters of the open source Web browser, with usage in the UK in December 2007 at 17.2%, with only Ukraine and the Netherlands below. The top three countries which make use of FireFox are Finland (45.4%), Slovenia (44.6%) and Poland (42.4%).

I must admit I find these figures disappointing and also somewhat surprising. Last year I wrote a post entitled FireFox - The Researchers Favourite Application? in which I was confident the the clear superiority of FireFox over its competitors would lead to much greater use of FireFox as a platform, with increased use of FireFox plugins. Mark Sammons, however, responded by arguing that “Firefox is not Enterprise-ready enough to be considered for migration from IE” and Phil Wilson agreed with Mark’s comment: “I’m glad Mark wrote that comment because it’s exactly what I was going to write when I read your post Brian“.

The evidence, it seems, backs up Mark and Phil’s views - for whatever reasons, FireFox isn’t the success many of us would have hoped for within the UK. Sad, but true.

A New Search Interface for HERO

I have been reading the September issue of the HERO Headlines magazine, which provides “the latest news from HERO Ltd, the company behind the UK’s official online gateway to higher education and research opportunities“.

An article in the magazine describes the release of a search tool which can be added to Internet Explorer and Firefox browser to enable the HERO.ac.uk Web site to be searched directly from the browser, without first having to go to the HERO Web site. Use of this search facility to search for articles about UKOLN is shown in the diagram.

At one stage there was a tendency in various Web development circles that browser-specific enhancements should be avoided, as they don’t necessarily provide universal solutions (in this case, users of the Opera browser may feel disenfranchised). I don’t go along with this argument - I feel that this provides a richer and easier-to-use solution for many users, whilst still allowing users of more specialist browsers (or old versions of Internet Explorer or Firefox) to search the Web site in the traditional way.

Congratulations to HERO for this development. Now how many institutions are configuring their browsers with similar search interfaces for their institutional Web site, I wonder?