I think his point wasnt so much that as to the fact that Explorer could in fact do it, and that this browser would shut out Netscape on all platforms, not just linux. But if there are efforts to get Mozilla up to speed and compete with Explorer, that Linux would have a viable alternative for Explorer on Windows. If there was an open - source version of Explorer, I imagine he would have suggested to join that group instead - perhaps

I do wonder about this--I have Communicator 4.61 for Windows 95 and I can't even remember the last time it crashed, and I visit java/javascript enabled sites all the time. I wonder why the disparity of stability from one computer to another?

Yes Netscape crashes on Windows too, but most webmasters check their sites against the windows version of Netscape and code around or don't use obviously broken bits.

You may still get random crashes, but you don't often get particular sites that are simply unusable (unless it's a purposefully IE-only site).

I agree. I was kind of hoping for a featur like this as well. A small version of the HTML 4 icon in the bottom of the status bar when a page validates or something.

iCab (a Mac browser) has this already. A smily face appears if the page is 4.0 compliant. You can set tolerance to strict or transitional. Its in beta (no CSS or JavaScript). www.icab.de.

Used it to check one of my websites.

It would be nice to see this in a Moz distro.

We need to convince the PHBs that their non-standard webpages are hurting the bottom line by driving away potential customers. A good way to do that is by providing statistics to show that a large number of users were unable to view their site properly.

Therefore, add a function to the browser to report non-compliant pages to a central database (maintained by the Mozilla developers). The report message would contain a URL, and an error code (the worst problem encountered), and the statistic would simply be a count of the number of messages received by URL and error-code.

There should, of course, be a browser preference setting to control whether the report is sent never, on approval, or automatically.

The collected statistics could be viewed by the PHB to check his site. Alternatively, a report could be sent to the webmasters of the sites showing the greatest number of problems. The stats would also provide good information for the Mozilla developers.

An alternative would be to define a standard message/protocol that the browser could use to report a problem to the server of the site where the problem occurred.

Well I used to only use Netscape except when I was testing webpages on both web browsers. I tried hard to stay loyal to Netscape but lately it just seems very difficult. Maybe I am missing something, but it seems to me that the biggest difference between version 4.61 and version 4.7 is the Shop@Netscape button, and making me download for hours, just for this, is an insult. It's strangely similar to the pathetic AOL 5 upgrade which adds nothing major. I feel torn because I want Netscape to win the browser war but I think they are doing a terrible job. For goodness sake, somebody please give me a reason to keep having faith. I'd try to help if I understood how the programming was organized. Well now that I've got out, I feel a little better. Bye now.