Hopefully, I'm in the right place... For the past two days, my browser has been crashing every few hours. I run Netscape 4.8. I have been spending a lot of time at Renderosity looking at images. I often do this, by the way, and haven't had this difficulty before. I'm suspicious that it may be the result of some change Renderosity made in its recent upgrades. Please pass this on to the technical people. I will be happy to work with them. As for running something else, not a chance! I'm a die-hard Netscape 4x user. I bet I have some company, so it would be worthwhile to make sure Renderosity's pages don't crash it. :)

Netscape 4.8/4.7xxx crashes are a bug of Netscape that wasn't corrected and there are no more updates for 4.xxxx. Netscape 6.xx is very slow, so I don't use it. I don't know the reasons of the crashes, but they are related to some link in the pages that doesn't respond. Try to clear the cache, sometime it helps, or try to access some time later. Anyway Netscape 4.xx is much better and powerful than IE.

I agree with your assessment of Netscape versus IE. But clearing the cache doesn't help (in fact, you can't even do it) if the browser has already crashed. :(

Sometimes reinstalling Netscape helps for those crashes. But I'd recommend installing Opera.

You can clear the cache starting again Netscape, or with explorer clear the folder NetscapeUsersxxxxcache. Sometimes clearing the cache before accesing Renderosity helps, or try some time later when the broken link is working. With the Galleries/Forums/MarketPlace I don't have any problem, but the crashing is common some days when I go to the freestuff.

PatGoltz, thanks for letting us know anbout your browser problems. Does this problem occur when you are visiting any particular page or trying to do anything in particular at Renderosity, such as visiting a certain forum or gallery, or trying to download or upload a file or post? Knowing specific details about the circumstances when the crash occurs might help debug this particular issue with your browser. :-)>

@ Erlik, I have Opera. I don't like it at all. I just use it for testing my web pages. I would prefer not to have to reinstall Netscape. It means I'd have to back up my bookmarks and everything in my email program. It would be a pain. @ kawecki: You're right. I could clear the cache that way, but of course by the time the browser crashes, clearing the cache doesn't resurrect it. I spend so much time on Renderosity some days that clearing the cache frequently is a time-consuming proposition. I haven't been over at Freestuff lately. @ PunkClown: I was accessing pictures from thumbnails pages in the Terragen gallery when it happened, usually. I don't believe it happened in response to any other action, if I recall correctly. I may or may not have had a crash when uploading, but I don't think I did. I didn't have a crash when posting. Hope that helps.

Just move the bookmark.htm, the preference and mailbox files to a different directory, uninstall Netscape, reinstall it and then move the bookmarks and mailboxes back, overwriting the newly created files. No complicated action needed. BTW, I was a champion of Netscape 4.7, but I dropped it a couple of years ago because it simply cannot show CSS properly.

You don't need to reinstall Netscape, this will change nothing. I am still using Netscape 4.80 and have no problems with most of the sites. Some sites I cannot access because they use an incompatible Java (bad Java or with errors), but if the site doesn't care how it is build, I don't care to visit it. A site must be accessible without using Java and Java can be used only as an optional visual enhacement of the site! Another thing you can do is install Netscape 4.73, maybe 4.75, I don't remenber from which version the crashing bug exist (4.78???), before this, Netscape never crashed and only have some problems with Java. Maybe if you change only netscape.exe version 4.80 with the exe of version 4.75 will solve all the problems, good idea for experimenting!

@ Erlik, I know what I have to do to reinstall Netscape safely; I have done it before. It's a lot of work. I haven't found any obvious, blaring failure to show CSS properly that would cause me to give up using Netscape, which I use for other reasons. @ kawecki, You probably mean Javascript, which is a different language from Java. I keep Java turned off because it is a resource hog that crashes my computer eventually. I don't miss much because I keep it turned off. Javascript is necessary for most forms, and some other functions, and while Netscape 4x doesn't handle the later versions adequately, it's not usually a problem.