Went to this site today. It’s associated with my health insurance company, a major regional company with millions in revenues every year. They probably have dozens of people working on their web site.
And yet this is the warning message I get when going to their site using the latest version of Firefox, a browser used by millions of people every day.
Also note the browsers they do claim to support. You can’t even download Netscape Navigator anymore.
Sure you can, at browser.netscape.com. It’s just not supported any more.
Actually, you can download Netscape 9 at browser.netscape.com. But they have discontinued support for it, as explained here:
http://blog.netscape.com/2007/12/28/end-of-support-for-netscape-web-browsers/
An interesting quote from the above link:
“While internal groups within AOL have invested a great deal of time and energy in attempting to revive Netscape Navigator, these efforts have not been successful in gaining market share from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Recently, support for the Netscape browser has been limited to a handful of engineers tasked with creating a skinned version of Firefox with a few extensions.
“AOL’s focus on transitioning to an ad-supported web business leaves little room for the size of investment needed to get the Netscape browser to a point many of its fans expect it to be. Given AOL’s current business focus and the success the Mozilla Foundation has had in developing critically-acclaimed products, we feel it’s the right time to end development of Netscape branded browsers, hand the reins fully to Mozilla and encourage Netscape users to adopt Firefox.”
It’s kind of sad to see the long and slow death of Netscape. I remember using Netscape 3.x and 4.x back in the day. Back then, the “N” logo with the little comets or whatever flying around it was synonymous with web browsing.
Nowadays, I use Firefox exclusively, other than for web site testing, where I have to use IE just to be sure that web pages that I develop or test display OK with IE. It’s hard for me to understand though why so many people use IE instead of Firefox—I guess in many cases it’s just because IE comes installed on their computer.
By the way, I am not located in Germany, despite the German flag next to my name in the comment above—I’m actually in the United States. But for some reason, both Google and Blogger are convinced that my IP address is in Germany, and so I get the German versions of Google and Blogger whenever I go to those sites. I’ve reported the problem to Google, and they have confirmed that the problem is on their end, and that they’ll fix it . . . in a MONTH or so. And now I see that your blog comments think that I’m in Germany too. Nothing against Germany—in fact I’m mostly German by ancestry. But this is getting a bit annoying.
I recently found out to my horror that I can’t use the web page that I HAVE to use to do my time sheet using Opera…. I get a similar error message…. It wanted either Netscape or Explorer… I wanted to smack it a good one! Yeeps!