Six of one…

Recently Netscape 6.1 was released, and it is a huge improvement on Netscape 6.0. It is still rather memory hungry, it’s still slow — though not so sluggish as the first release. This time, and again unlike Netscape 6.0, I can’t see any major differences between it and the Mozilla build it is derived from. If it continues to improve, Netscape are in serious danger of releasing a browser which is a pleasure to use. [See sidebar for a quick look at what’s so good about N6.1]

I can’t help thinking, though, that the writing is on the wall for Netscape.

If you have only come online in the past year or so you may not be aware of it, but Netscape was once the undisputed number one browser. You don’t have to take my word for it, you can see statistics from January 1996 at the old Random Yahoo Link. This is what it shows as the basic breakdown of browser flavours:

Browser Flavours	%
Netscape	70.1
Mosaic	18.4
Lynx	5.8
other	5.7

Netscape at 70% and not a Microsoft browser in sight? How times have changed! In fact, “Microsoft Explorer” is there, hidden within the Mosaic group and having less than 7% of the market. This was the way the Web was five years ago, and this is why some old sites boast that they are “optimised for Netscape”, or “best with Netscape 3.0.”

Five years on, Netscape is no longer number one, as a glance at the continually updated UIUC stats (the current equivalent of the Random Yahoo Link) shows. As I write, it breaks down the browser flavours like so:

Browser Flavours	%
Microsoft	77.6
Netscape	17.9
other	4.6

Microsoft now has a bigger chunk of the market than Netscape had when the Random Yahoo Link closed down. Netscape is still reckoned as being one of the “Big 2” — but at 18% it is very much in second place.

Now, care needs to be taken with browser stats. You can’t look at a set of stats and say this is the way the world is. You don’t know how many people are using browsers masquerading as Netscape or MSIE; you don’t know if, for some unknown reason, there has been a sudden surge (or dip) in the visits by users of a specific browser; you may not be aware of some reason (relating to factors of occupation, geography, income, and so on) which might skew your stats in a particular direction. What is helpful, though, is to look at trends, and that’s what I’ve been doing recently with my stats for this site.

The first trend has been, over the past eighteen months at least, a steady decline in the market share of Netscape from 25–30% to 15–20%. Today’s figures from UIUC put it just about in the middle of that range; my site’s figures tend to be slightly lower. My impression has been that the decline has levelled off, although WebReference.com does give a figure for yesterday of 10.28% for Netscape and 81.3% for MSIE. Whether that’s a sign of continuing decline, a rogue set of stats or perhaps due to some bias in the WebReference.com audience, time will tell.

The second trend relates to the change within the Netscape market. Netscape 6.0 was launched late last year. For a few months I saw hardly any hits from N6, then there was a steady rise to about 5% of my site’s visitors. Then that rise stopped, and so far I see little sign of it increasing further. Recent stats from my site consistently show Netscape as accounting for about 15% of visitors (bear in mind some of these may be users of iCab, etc.) with two-thirds of that group using Netscape 4.7 or lower.

That in itself is suggestive of a reluctance of Netscape users to move to the new browser, but in fact my stats seem to be exceptional. WebReference.com shows only 1.35% of visitors using N6; UIUC shows it accounting for less than 5% of the Netscape users.

The third interesting feature of my site’s stats recently has been the appearance of MSIE 6. This, if you haven’t heard, is the latest version of Internet Explorer for Windows. As with Netscape 6, MSIE 6 is reportedly much more standards-compliant than any previous version; like Netscape 6, it uses the <!DOCTYPE> to determine whether or not to use its standards-compliant mode. With its appearance, cross browser headaches should begin to be a thing of the past, at least as far as (X)HTML and CSS are concerned. In recent stats, I’ve been seeing at least as many users — and at times twice as many users — of MSIE 6 as Netscape 6 users.

This is interesting because MSIE 6 has not been released yet. That’s right: Netscape 6 is on its first upgrade and it has barely as many users as the beta versions of IE6. (At least, as far as my site’s stats show.)

When Netscape 6 was first released its one edge over MSIE for Windows was its excellent compliance with standards, although that’s hardly the sort of thing which is going to enthuse the average user. With the release of MSIE 6 — any day now, honest (the standard Microsoft release date) — that edge has been lost.

Netscape 6.1 is much better than the original release. It is more stable, has fewer bugs as far as I can see, and generally seems a lot more finished. However, what I said at the end of my first piece about Netscape 6.0 remains true:

Netscape 6 is a browser which, when its little ‘features’ are ironed out, would be able to hold its own against Internet Explorer — if the playing field were level. Unfortunately for Netscape, the playing field isn’t level… Being just about as good as Internet Explorer simply is not enough.

Well, I said I think the writing is on the wall for Netscape as a vendor of browsers. Bad enough for them to have been reduced to about 25% of the market, being pushed down to 15% or below is very bad news.

Worse still is the fact that Netscape users — who, you would have thought, should be gagging for a better browser than Netscape 4.x — seem very reluctant to shift to Netscape 6. If established Netscape users aren’t attracted by Netscape 6, who will be?

And this is all Netscape’s fault: they can’t blame anyone but themselves. Netscape 4 was a buggy, less-than-stable beast with dodgy CSS support (which was not wholly Netscape’s fault). In competition with Internet Explorer, which from the user’s perspective was getting better and better with every upgrade, Netscape’s failure to do more than release some bugfix upgrades guaranteed that erstwhile Netscape users would drift towards MSIE. Then, when they finally do release a new version, it’s an absolute monster, grabbing vast amounts of memory, painfully slow on even a decent machine.

Netscape 6.1 is based on Mozilla 0.9.2.1. They look almost identical. They behave almost identically. Yet N6.1 is noticeably slower than Mozilla, and wants more memory. Everything that is good about Netscape 6.1 is there in Mozilla. Everything added to the browser by Netscape is either odious (the menu options which are nothing more than advertising) or pointless.

I look at Mozilla and I think, this is a good work in progress, an open-source, standards-compliant browser which is improving all the time.

I look at Netscape 6.1 and I think, this is sluggish; I look at Netscape’s additions to the basic Mozilla and I think, these people don’t know what users want from a browser. They deserve to fail.

Does it matter if Netscape fails and bows out of the browser market? I think it does. I’m not hankering after the days of Netscape’s hegemony, far from it. But the market needs more than one big player now just as much as it did when Netscape was king of the castle. There is no other vendor at the moment who can credibly compete with Microsoft. If it isn’t Netscape, who will it be? And increasingly, it looks like it won’t be Netscape.

Six of one…

Further reading:

25/8/01

Also new this week:

S I D E B A R S