Home.netscape.com crashes Netscape 4.79

Netscape 4.79, which was the last release of the closed-sourced pre-Mozilla Netscape browser, had its default home page set to home.netscape.com. Curious, I went over to evolt.org and downloaded and installed Netscape 4.79 in Windows XP to see how this page looks in this ancient browser. Since this was the home page for this ancient browser, I figured some effort would be made to make this page render in that browser, perhaps with a note, only visible in NS4, to update one's browser.

Nope.

The web page redirects to an AOL web page that has some HTML or Javascript that crashes the Netscape browser.

As an aside, both maradns.org and samiam.org (my personal webpage) render fine (albeit without CSS) in Netscape 4.79, but this blog doesn't render. While this blog doesn't crash NS 4, the text here is not visible. The reason is because this blog is a combination of Google's and my own design, and I no longer deal with Netscape 4 compatibility.

My web sites look OK in Netscape because Netscape compatibility was still a (very minor) issue back in 2004 and 2005 when I designed these sites.

If you have some ancient computer that can't run IE6 or Firefox, use Dillo which renders my sites fine, albeit without CSS, last time I tested against it. Or, better yet, get out of your mother's basement and get a new computer; they're only $250 at Dell.

Yeah, Netscape has a lot of memories for me. Back in the 1990s I rooted for Netscape because Internet Explorer was not available for Linux; since Linux never did (and never will) have a significant desktop usage share, this didn't save Netscape as the old Unix workstations died out and were replaced by Windows NT desktops throughout the 1990s. Of course, these days with Opera available for Linux, and Firefox having over 20% browser usage share (Linux kernel developers can learn a lot from Firefox's success on the desktop), this is all a non-issue.