Stardate 20020218.1345

(Captain's log): I think that Navigator version 4 must be the most unpopular browser there is, among people creating web sites. It's horribly buggy and has idiosyncratic ways of rendering sites. A lot of web designers have had to go to a lot of work to make their sites look correct for that browser. Others have given up trying.

But there are other bugs in Nav 4, and some of them aren't necessarily apparent to the people using it. In particular, it has a bug in how it handles referers, and I keep seeing the results of that bug in my referer logs. The correct way to handle refers is for the browser to report the "come from" page only if you actually clicked a link there to get to here. In all other cases it should report a null-string. But Nav 4 reports whereever it was most recently, even if you used a shortcut to get here, or directly enter my URL in the address box on the browser. I get to find out where you were just before, no matter where that was, even if it doesn't have a link to me.

Which makes for some rather odd entries in my referer logs, such as www.xxxmoviemart.com, which I just saw there from one of my Nav4-using visitors. I know exactly which page at that site he was looking at because I get the entire URL. I also have his IP, which means I know who his ISP is, and with some work I could probably figure out his name. For instance, my message forum keeps the posting IP for every article there; if any article has ever been posted from that IP then I could find out who it was. I'm not going to do that because I don't want to invade his privacy. But others might.

There's no sense in leaving tracks like that in cyberspace. I would recommend an upgrade. At this point there's no good reason for anyone to be using that particularly wretched browser version, and a hell of a lot of good reasons for abandoning it.