Netscape 4 is a pile of old crap. There’s really no getting away from that fact. The interface is horrible and dull, the rendering engine is terrible, glitching up on simple HTML, not to mention even basic CSS and HTML 4 stuff. Worse still, when a page is rendered wrong, hitting refresh a couple of times will sometimes correct the problem, prompting the question, “What the hell is going on?”

For many years, while Internet Explorer was at the height of its dominancy, Netscape 4.7 was the only other browser most designers would try to support. Supporting this browser though, was well-known to be one of the most difficult tasks to get right, due to its inscrutable rendering problems and dreadful support for CSS and JavaScript.

Designing sites that work in this archaic browser is easier than it used to be. Simply hide your stylesheets from it by importing them. Navigator 4 users are used to seeing unstyled content at this stage. In the vast majority of cases, you don’t even need to test in this browser anymore.

Netscape Navigator 8 is a browser originally based on the Mozilla suite, with some Netscape branding and extra unnecessary interface options thrown in on top. As such it’s also an excellent browser, but the Mozilla suite or Firefox will be more regularly updated so I’d advise you to go for one of them. One very interesting feature it has in the Windows version is the ability to switch the rendering engine between Internet Explorer’s and Gecko, so you can easily see how your site looks in both.