The Netscape 4 Experience

I tested in Netscape 4.77/Mac. Wow. Talk about nostalgia! The current
site renders pretty closely to what I get in modern browsers, though it
takes quite a while to load (might be my machine, running OS9 in
emulation, might be the nested table structure) and the type is too
small.

Checking the pages I'd worked on, they load fast and all the
information is there, but there's not presentation, as it doesn't apply
the CSS. Again, the type is in general too small.

For some reason, Euler Taveira de Oliveira's pages (model-4.html,
model-6.html, and model-7.html) wouldn't load properly. They'd start to
load and then stall for at least a minute, even locking up the whole
browser. If I went and did something else, trying to get the browser to
refresh, coming back after a minute or two would show the page loaded.
And they look like they do in modern browsers, even with good type
size! But as soon as I would do anything (like resize the window),
Netscape would want to rerender the page and lock up again. My gut
feeling is that there's something in running Netscape 4.7 under Mac OS9
emulation, possibly rendering the nested tables, that's causing this
slow down. (The current postgresql.org page behaves similarly, just
doesn't take so long to render.)

How much support should we give older browsers (4.x and before)? My
little brief excursion with Netscape isn't very realistic. You'd have
to be insane to run Netscape 4.7 in Classic on Mac OS X. Have others
tested these pages on similarly old software? I'd like to see visitors
using older browsers getting the information, and since I'd suspect a
majority of people using 4.x browsers are also on older hardware,
possibly with slower, possibly dial-up connections, page size and
render times may be an issue. Of course I want to help make the
PostgreSQL site look great (otherwise I wouldn't be here). But if it's
important to provide a good experience even with older browsers, I
think "a good experience with older browsers" might mean "a fast,
information rich" user experience rather than "a slow but pretty" user
experience.

So it boils down to two things:

1. Do we want to support older browsers? I think the answer is yes, of
course we do. Why turn anyone away if we don't have to?

2. What kind of experience do we want for people using older browsers?
(and how do we give it to them?)

Michael