16 Aug
2004
16 Aug
'04
2:02 p.m.
It was thus said that the Great Ashley Carder once stated:
About a year and a half ago, one of my higher volume sites (50,000 hits
per day, I think) showed that 95% of all users were Internet Explorer
and about 2 or 3 percent were Netscape. I still had to support Netscape,
though, and our staff spent many hours coding things so that web sites
would remain Netscape friendly.
I would double check the hit patterns. My own experience with Netscape 4
counters yours. One site I just checked (for 12th of August) received
22,000 hits that day (about half your site from 18 months ago). Checking
for Mozilla/4 (Netscape 4x) and filtering out MSIE ended up with the
following:
28 Mozilla/4.77 [en] (Win98; U)
16 Mozilla/4.76 [en] (PalmOS; U; WebPro3.0; Palm-Arz1)
2 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;)
Granted, the site "works" better in MSIE, so on the assumption it wasn't
a
valid sample, I then used the logs from one of my own personal sites [1]
that received 38,000 hits last month. The results there were:
945 Mozilla/4.0 compatible ZyBorg/1.0 (wn-2.zyborg(a)looksmart.net;
http://www.WISEnutbot.com)
669 Mozilla/4.08
109 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; grub-client-2.3)
28 Mozilla/4.0
23 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; grub-client-1.5.3; Crawl your own stuff with
http://grub.org)
18 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible)
16 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;)
12 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; grub-client-1.0.5; Crawl your own stuff with
http://grub.org)
8 Mozilla/4.5 [en] (Win98; I)
6 Mozilla/4.7 [en] (X11; I; SunOS 5.8 sun4u)
6 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Win32; WinHttp.WinHttpRequest.5)
5 Mozilla/4.07 [en] (X11; I; Linux 2.0.39 i486; Nav)
4 Mozilla/4.75 [de] (Windows NT 5.0; U)
4 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; BorderManager 3.0)
3 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; grub-client-1.4.3; Crawl your own stuff with
http://grub.org)
2 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MS FrontPage 6.0)
1 Mozilla/4.78 [en] (Win95; U)
1 Mozilla/4.77C-CCK-MCD {C-UDP; EBM-APPLE} (Macintosh; U; PPC)
1 Mozilla/4.77 [en] (Windows NT 5.0; U)
1 Mozilla/4.73 [de]C-CCK-MCD DT (Win98; U)
1 Mozilla/4.61 [en] (Win98; I)
1 Mozilla/4.61 [en] (OS/2; U)
1 Mozilla/4.5 (compatible; HTTrack 3.0x; Windows 98)
1 Mozilla/4.5 (compatible; HTTrack 2.0x; Windows 98)
1 Mozilla/4.0 compatible ZyBorg/1.0 Dead Link Checker (wn.dlc(a)looksmart.net;
http://www.WISEnutbot.com)
1 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Netcraft Web Server Survey)
1 Mozilla/4.0 (Windows NT 4.0)
1 Mozilla/4.0 (Exotic Crawler)
So, about 31 true Netscape 4 users that I can tell, or about 0.08% of the
users to my site. I think it's probably safe to ignore Netscape 4 for the
most part.
-spc (at least, in my case ... )
[1] http://boston.conman.org