Stardate 20010726.2227 (Crew, this is the Captain): I've receive an email informing me that my page displays strangely in Netscape. Since I was using such basic formatting, it hadn't occurred to me that there would be a problem. So I downloaded and installed 6.1beta on my laptop and noticed that the header was loused up. In particular, the header looked strange because it turns out that Netscape handles background images in tables differently; it restarts the background image for each cell instead of going smoothly for the whole table. And in fact it was handling other aspects of the cell structure strangely, so I changed it and now that seems to display properly, at least with the version of Netscape I was using. As of this change just made to the header, the page now displays the same on Netcape 6.1B as it does for me in IE. If anyone notices any display problems, I'd appreciate hearing about them (and also please tell me which version of Netscape you're using, and approximately what it is that seems wrong).
Netscape's install program is a pain; I automatically and unconditionally got an AOL advertisement icon installed on my desktop (and probably some gawdawful huge program behind it somewhere bizarre wasting my disk space), and Netscape made itself the default browser even though I told it I didn't want it to be. It also defaults to showing all kinds of commercial crap that I don't want, and if I had done a default install I'd have gotten AIM and RealPlayer and just a pile of other things I didn't want. I was also forced to create some sort of account name, though I have no idea what that might have been used for. I suppose all this is a side effect of the AOL take-over. Also, having a product banner that sits on the screen while the program is loading is really lame. And it seems to take three times as long to initialize as IE does. Not too impressive, beta or no beta. If this is the kind of crap they've been foisting on the world for the last three years, it's no wonder they lost the browser war. (discuss)
