Browser war retro: IE6 vs Netscape in 2011

If you took the raw, patch, 10-year-old versions of Internet Explorer 6 and Netscape 6.1 and tried surfing the modern Web? What would happen?

A decade ago, Internet Explorer 6 and Netscape fought for the hearts and minds of the public Web browsing. But since then, IE6 was vilified as unsalvageable and abandoned by its creator, and Netscape has faded into history books. You may still browse the Web with these two ancient browser?

You might think of cooking up IE6 or Netscape would lead to an immediate onslaught of viruses, followed by computer grows a mutant arm to detach itself from suicide or maybe bashing on your hard disk and processor. The reality is a little different-but only a little.

Just for fun (my definition of "fun" is pretty warped), I decided to spend some time using the original version of IE6, patch and a version of Netscape released approximately at the same time. It turns out that IE6 is still able to surf the Internet very modern, but Netscape troubles show probably dead death justified.

As you may recall, Microsoft destroyed Netscape by bundling the early versions of Internet Explorer with Windows, which leads to antitrust investigations and the creation of a monopoly that would not be challenged until Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome came to start sucking away market share.

A key inflection point in the history of the Web browser has occurred a decade ago, in August 2001, when Microsoft released IE6 not long after Netscape came out with its sixth-generation browser.

Incredibly, IE6 is still in wide use today, from more than one in 10 people browsing the Web, according to Net Applications using tracker. Durable nature of IE6 is due to businesses using applications that run only on IE6 and people who never upgraded Windows XP, or laziness or because they are using pirated copies of the operating system.

Although Netscape has paved the way for Mozilla Firefox, Netscape browser, it was already on its way out in 2001 and has now all but disappeared, with official support ending in March 2008.

I began my experiment, trying to track down IE6 and Netscape 6-specifically Netscape 6.1, which was based on early code from the Mozilla project and also published in August 2001. Acquisition of both browsers had a little more difficult than I expected, although getting older versions of Netscape is quite easy. Are all available in Netscape.

But after cooking on a Windows XP virtual machine on my desktop Windows 7, I realized that I was using a version of IE6 that was completed in 2008, when it was released the Service Pack 3 for Windows XP. Microsoft, of course, makes it difficult to downgrade. In order to obtain the oldest, most awesome version of IE6, I had to find an original, 2001 copy of Windows XP that lacked any patch and service pack updates.

With those minor details out of the way, I was able to run IE6 versions 2001 and Netscape 6.1 on Windows XP operating system inside a virtual machine created with VirtualBox to Oracle. Here's what I learned.

IE6 beat Netscape for a reason

It's pretty clear that IE6 was the best browser, with an interface more minimal and the ability to view websites more modern and even play some Flash and Java content, including games and YouTube videos. I couldn't install Flash on Netscape because of a series of error messages and problems uploading of download sites.

Netscape 6.1 had a terrible interface, with a huge left sidebar giving you links to stocks, news, and bookmarks. Fortunately, this can be moved to the side to open up more valuable to surf the Web. I'm guessing Netscape has worked very well in 2001, but there are some sites-NetworkWorld.com-which I couldn't upload to Netscape and others where the text and graphics were all cut up.

IE6 has wasted space too high, but most sites charge and feels much more modern than Netscape. Unfortunately, Microsoft didn't improve the UI nearly enough in IE7 and IE8, the browser's leading rapid decline and the rise of Firefox and Chrome. Microsoft has had a huge step forward with Internet Explorer 6, but IE6 doesn't seem all that different from his two successors.

Virus

I expected to be hit with a virus attack when I open IE6, due to the widely known security holes in the browser that cause problems for users in this day and Microsoft. But do not run in any obvious security problems, in part, I am sure, because I spent most of my time on sites that should be safe, like Wikipedia and ESPN.com.

Any website-no matter how seemingly legitimate-yet able to host malware. Remembering that I am not getting hit by a virus, I'm not recommending that someone actually use IE6.

Netscape, meanwhile, simply stopped working after an hour or so, that gives me the error message "File for the application has encountered a problem and needs to close Netscape." Once that happened, I couldn't open the browser at all, even after you restart Windows XP.

Simply reinstall Netscape didn't work either. To continue testing your browser completely and reinstalled Windows XP moved up to Netscape 6.2.1, released in November of 2001, giving me a version that was released after Windows XP and theoretically might work better on the operating system.

Modern Web navigation

Despite being 10 years old, IE6 can load most modern websites with few problems. It is slow, it gets a lot of warnings about using an outdated browser and does not display the contents quite as crisply and clean like Chrome, Firefox or IE9. But you can play YouTube videos, read articles ESPN.com and access Facebook.

The new version of Twitter poses some problems, however, and benchmarks reveal shortcomings of IE6. I ran a benchmark testing IE6 JavaScript gave a score of 24, compared to 759 for Chrome (though I was running Chrome on Windows 7).

The JavaScript reference site did not work at all on Netscape and two other test sites also worked on IE6 but not Netscape. One of these was a demo of Doom-style cloth, loaded on IE6, but played only slowly and hesitant.

Netscape could load sites simple, text-based, like Google and Wikipedia, but content sites like ESPN and Huffington Post were all cut, with links and text overlay. On Facebook, Netscape couldn't get past the login screen and struggled mightily to view any content on Twitter.

Clearly, it should not be using Netscape and IE6 to surf on the Web today. But if you want to see what would happen if we did, check out the screenshots.

Follow Jon Brodkin on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jbrodkin

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