Happy Happy Joy Joy

[andysocial]

I downloaded and installed Netscape 6.2.1 at work this morning. I can still use NS4.7 if I want to feel in pain, and IE-crippled edition is still around too. Now I can see my LiveJournal pages as they were intended, DIV tags and all. Woohoo!

Meanwhile, as I was checking some HTML pages I was editing at work, I noticed a cool feature of NS6 - acronym highlighting. As part of my efforts to improve "accessibility" to the web pages I make, I follow many of the Section 508 requirements and recommendations. One is to break out acronyms with the <acronym> tag. Cool feature, and screen readers can be set to voice them for people. However, they are invisible to the normal browser. Except NS6. Hover over an underlined acronym and BAM! A popup tooltip shows what that acronym means. Combine that with the support for alternate stylesheets, and NS6 is shaping up to be a pretty damned good browser, now that they've killed the showstopping bugs in version 6.0.

I think I'll stick with Opera at home, though - I have grown accustomed to the MDI interface.

Comments

[sasha.livejournal.com]

Heh, grown accustomed to the...uh...inter...heh...

I always wanted to use Opera, but though it may be more exact with html rendering, it deviated so much from IE and NS on so many pages that I just couldn't do it. I dunno...has it gotten better?

Opera

[andysocial]

I know Opera 4 annoyed the heck out of me, but Opera 6 is great. I can't think of a page that I have to use a different browser for now, while previous versions I had to make sure not to rely on it too much.

I think there are two reasons for Opera becoming more useful: Opera itself got updated, and more web designers are following standards. As NS6 and IE6 crow about how standards-compiant they are, it becomes more of a known issue than when Opera was the only browser that cared what the World Wide Web Consortium said.
Give it a shot, you may be surprised.

And, the MDI interface - one set of toolbars for multiple windows, or a Multiple Document Interface. On Opera 6, it's an option, on older versions it was mandatory. Good to have choices.

Re: Opera

[sasha.livejournal.com]

Well, on the first test runs, it's been a well behaved little browser (plus all the great benefits to using Opera, of course)...except on my journal page of all things. It seems to ignore the css margins (so I added redundant tags) and an empty spacer column I have on the left, plus it doesn't wrap the text...what the heck? I'm not the most thorough page builder in the world, but I don't know what the heck caused THIS...

Re: Opera

[sasha.livejournal.com]

Oh, I see it, I have an entry that has a long string without a space...it still should wrap it though. ;(

Sorry, I'm sure you didn't want this to turn into me raving about my own journal design. ;)

Re: Opera

[andysocial]

LOL! That's all right. I know long unbroken strings seem to cause issues with Opera and almost every other browser too.

NS 6 rocks.

[talitha-oy.livejournal.com]

At least so far. I've been using 6.2 for a month now, and I really like it. WAY better than the beta edition, and the Java Console is so much better than the JRE Utility in the beta, which crashed my system every chance it could get. I'm pleased with the end result. Well, so far anyhow. It could all change at any moment!! I really like being able to set up the mail to access all my web-based email, so I can get all that crap from a single interface. Yay, now I can get THREE TIMES the spam in Netscape, WOOHOO!

Re: NS 6 rocks.

[andysocial]

Lys, if you have more than one web-based email account, you have issues. Even one is too many for a good geek, except that Yahoo forces you to have an email account if you just want to use Yahoo Messenger. Phbt! on them.

Re: NS 6 rocks.

[talitha-oy.livejournal.com]

Hey, I have a good excuse for having more than one.
Earthlink is my master account, and the address I give to family, friends, and registered web sites I actually want to get newsletters from, like Discovery.com.
Yahoo is for roaming access away from home, and is the address I use to register at most web sites that require an address, to minimize the spam in my Earthlink box. It's basically my second email, and the only one I care about after Earthlink.
Hotmail I got only because I needed to download MSN Messenger to talk to Helena in Scotland, because she can't seem to get AIM to work. MSN Messenger requires that you have a Hotmail address in order to have an MSNM account. I have to check it once in a while or they deactivate it, along with my Messenger account.
I have a Netscape.com email address because Netscape gives you one automatically with newer editions of Netscape, and you get one now when you register for an AIM account. This one I also have to check to keep active. I also sometimes give this one to web sites, because I don't care if they spam this one.
So, see, I'm not nuts. ;)

Buzz!

[andysocial]

I have MSN Messenger, and no Hotmail. I have a Passport account, but not Hotmail. I think it's a relatively new thing, though, cuz I thought you had to have Hotmail last time I tried out MSNM. I only have that particular evil POS program because my family is too dim to download anything that doesn't come with the OS. Nobody else I know uses MSNM.
I know about the automatic Netscape mail, but I've never received anything in it. AIM checks it automatically and tells me it's empty. :-)

Re: Buzz!

[talitha-oy.livejournal.com]

Yeah, AIM does the same thing for me, and ninety percent of the time, I ignore it. Every once in a while I check it to clean it out. I have the same attitude towards MSNM that you do. If Helena could get her ass to keep AIM working, I wouldn't have damn MSNM at all. And I believe you're right about the Hotmail Passport requirement being new, because the first time I downloaded Microshaft's crummy little chatter, that wasn't required, but this time it was. That's just Microshaft's way of sucking you into their twisted world.