More MS sabatoge of Netscape?

[Darryl Friesen]

>Has anyone else experienced difficulty viewing Microsoft sites with
>Netscape browsers?  I have Netscape 4.61 and it keeps loosing it on the
>MSNBC web site.  Specifically, I loose the ability to click on hypertext
>links (I can click, but the new page isn't opened), and closing and
>re-opening the browser doesn't solve the problem--I have to restart the PC.
> I do have the necessary MS plugins for this site.

I've seen that behavior a lot visiting non-Microsoft sites.  I'd be willing
to bet it's a bug in Netscape, not malicious intent on the part of
Microsoft.

>Does anyone have any information about known bugs with Netscape and MS ASP
>pages?  Since Microsoft seems to be providing ever more content on the Web,
>if it is a purposely built in incompatibility, it would seem users are
>forced to use Internet Explorer to view these sites.

ASP is processed on the server side before the document is delivered, so I'm
not sure there actually could be an 'incompatibility'.  The resulting
document may not be interpreted properly (due to differing levels of support
for the HTML standard, or because non-standard features are used), but the
ASP part should be transparent.  The same functionality can be achieved with
Perl, PHP, Cold Fusion or probably a dozen other products.

>Last, it seems disingenous to me for Microsoft to be making a case for
>"open standards" when it comes to instant messaging at the same time as
>they are constantly thwarting HTML standards.

Well, I can't say much about open standards.  All my experience shows that
Internet Explorer (especially 5) follows the HTML 4.0 spec MUCH MUCH closer
than Netscape.  Not sure how that counts as twarting.


- Darryl

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  Darryl Friesen, B.Sc.                        Darryl.Friesen at usask.ca
  Programmer/Analyst                            http://gollum.usask.ca/
  Consulting & Development, Computing Services
  University of Saskatchewan                   "The Truth Is Out There"
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