This page was created in March 1996. Since 1997, Netscape is no longer a monopolist, but rather a losing side of corporate battles. From Spring 1998 on, Netscape makers made its code publicly available, which rectifies some of their wrongdoings. This page remains as a monument to the days when Netscape reigned in glory.

Why I hate Netscape

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Ban the <A TARGET="..."> tag!

There are million reasons to dislike Netscape (the only program I know which is able to crash standard X running on the standard Sun SparcStation and reboot the standard SunOS Unix). I always disliked Netscape, because I used to use monochrome monitors, so most Netscape-specific color schemes looked as black-on-black. But, ability of making the fonts and backgrounds colored is not entirely without merit, even if its implementation by Netscape is braindead. Netscape corporation is braindead anyway. They still have not been able to fix the print function so all different-encoded documents get printed as garbage. And Netscape Corporation is greedy and hell-bent on monopoly, just like Microsoft.

Needless to say, the Netscape-specific HTML extensions are epitome of evil. No self-respecting HTML stylist partakes this abomination. Let your pages be Mosaic-friendly.

If I don't write anything about Internet Explorer, it's only because I don't use Micro$oft products. I may warm up to scat and BDSM, but I don't like unconsensual bondage.

We have Linux, we have Emacs, we have TeX, we have X11, we have gcc, we have tons of decent, free, fun to play with software. The only reason why we don't have a decent browser is that some greedy company adopted Micro$oft's tactics and brow-beats the WWW community into spurious and harmful changes of HTML standard, giving no space for maneuver to independent browser-designers. By now, you probably have guessed the name of this incompetent monopolist corporation.

Recently I started hating Netscape with passion. Why? The dreaded <A TARGET="..."> tag.

It seems that in Russia most Netscape documents get produced with Micro$oft Word or some such poor attempt at text processor and then converted to HTML using some horrid homebrew converter. Result, whenever a positive-IQ HTML author would use <A HREF="...">, these Russian folks use <A TARGET="...">. Which means, whenever I try to follow some link, the braindead Netscape creates another browser window. This takes some time. Worse, the damn Netscape seems to be full of memory leaks, and even if I kill the first window immediately after the second is opened, the Netscape takes some additional memory and gets slower. After a while of going, this invariably crashes my X, killing all my programs and rebooting the Xstation (which has 32 Mb of RAM, by the way. Without Netscape Xstation works fine with 4 Mb, but with Netscape 3.*, 8 Mb is bare minimum).

Of course, there is nothing striking in Netscape crashing for someone accustomed to working on Mac or Windoze. On Unix, almost nothing crashes, ever, so I keep several things running at the same time, and crashes are painful.

I really need a way to disable the vile <A TARGET="...">. Ability to disable frames would have been nice as well (right now, I just ignore most frame-ridden pages). Right-button trick does not work.

Some of retards using <A TARGET="...">: a hall of shame.

I put here only the pages which I keep reading for some time -- the complete Hall of Shame will take half of Russian WWW servers.

Resistance in Russian WWW.

The Russian WWW is dominated by Microsoft and ugliest corporate spirit. The reasons are abound. Due to the criminal ``reforms'' of Gaydar and others, the budget of education was slashed drastically, so the students have hard time getting on the Net, comparing with the West. Hence there are almost no non-commercial WWW servers, and most folks who populate the web are the corporate boot-lickers and mindless wage slaves. While the rest of the population suffers from poverty, getting worse from year to year, the corporations wallow in profits and have jolly good time spreading advertisement and similar propaganda. The corporate enforcers (like the Lebedev of NMZhD fame) are those who determine the ugly face of Russian WWW, and these are of course addicted to commercial values.

There is another reason why the Russian hackers and Net people worship Microsoft, corporate values and advertisement. In Russia, the copyright enforcement is (fortunately) non-existent, so anybody can buy CD-ROMs with $40,000 worth of junk Microsoft software for $7. Not a good incentive to use GNU, uh? I don't think many of these poor misguided folks are aware of the GNU values, or even of GNU and Linux. The only Russian text of GNU manifesto that I came across was almost unintelligible, probably translated by computer program. Still, there are some voices of resistance, barely heard in this fountain of commercial filth.

Fellow Netscape-haters.

People who like frames should kill themselves

Also people who use scrolling text in the status bar.

Fellow frame haters:

Misha Verbitsky