If you read a few books on standards-based web design, you’ll learn about how to write CSS that works for Internet Explorer 5 and 6, for Netscape 4.x, and for Netscape 6, maybe 7 and 8 too. Yet I have browsers installed on my computer called Mozilla 5.0/Mozilla 1.7.1 and Firefox 1.0.6 built on Mozilla 5.0. Where is Netscape in all this? I thought I was using Netscape browsers.
Reading up on browsers at W3Schools, I think I understand now. Internet Explorer is easy: most IE users are on the latest version, version 6. Estimates from W3Schools put IE6 usage at greater than 60% of all Internet users. But a not-insignificant number still use version 5. Either way, IE is problematic because it doesn’t support CSS all that well. There are hopes that IE 7 will.
Now to Netscape. More confusing, but more standards-compliant. Netscape nearly died but was resurrected with the Mozilla project. Mozilla is not strictly a browser, but rather a code base out of which browsers are formed and it’s also the name of an Internet application suite. So why is one of the browsers installed on my computer called Mozilla? Oh, who knows. It’s incredibly confusing, this naming and versioning of various incarnations of Netscape.
So. You can download Netscape 4, 6, 7, or 8. You can get the latest Mozilla application suite, release 1.7.12. How do these relate to each other? Maybe it’s not so complex. Mozilla is aimed at developers while Netscape has more niceties for end users such as those who might have selected Netscape via AOL.
Or, you can get Firefox 1.5, intended to be a next-generation Mozilla-based browser, offering faster browsing and industrial-strength spyware/popup/virus blocking. I don’t use Firefox much even though I have it installed but I probably will migrate to it over the next couple months.
Phew. I think I get it now.
Wait a minute, though. There are a couple other browsers to be aware of. Opera is a free browser known for being smaller, faster, and more standards-compliant than the other browsers. Safari is a Macintosh browser that comes bundled with the Tiger OS. Web designers and developers who want to reach the broadest audience need to consider these browsers in their calculations too.
Next time: what’s Gecko?
UPDATE: The NY Times had a brief piece on Firefox 1.5 yesterday noting, among other things, that 1.5 offers a one-click “Clear Private Data” function that discards personal browsing data like passwords and history.
