Netscape eventually bowed to the pressure of common sense and threw in the towel on those proprietary extensions. The long awaited Netscape 6 was released near the end of last year. Its main claim to fame was that it wore the white hat of HTML and had not only jumped into bed with W3C recommendations but had become a born-again browser. The interface itself you either like or loathe, all big buttons and patronising nods to newbie naivety. Where Netscape revealed its real weakness was in not understanding the market it had fired itself into.
Compliance is one thing, the real world is another.
And in the world of the web, the vast majority of site designers decided to appeal to the majority audience and built their pages to display within IE5. The fact that Netscape 6 made Microsoft look positively bug-free didn't help either. The latest release has solved most, if not all, of the bug issues, but it's too little, too late. Microsoft has already captured 90 per cent of the market, and the release of IE6 as part of the Windows XP operating system is imminent. Not only will this be as standards-compliant as Netscape, but it will keep backwards compatibility.