My computer with Netscape 4.78 just started (last week) to be unusable on ebay. Usually it will let me display a particular auction, but when I hit the "Back" button to get back to the list of search results, it nearly always fails with an illegal instruction error message.

I have had no problems with Netscape on ebay in the past, and have been using this installation of this version of Netscape for about a year now.

Internet Explorer 6.0 seems to work OK but is not my browser of choice. (It's different from what I'm used to, so it can't be any good. Right?)

Is anybody else having trouble using Netscape on ebay, or is it just me?

tanstaafl.

Odds are, it's a problem with Javascript code on Ebay. That's what I'm guessing.

Netscape 4.x has always had problems with its javascript runtime interpreter, causing certain bits of javascript code to crash the browser. I'm guessing they made a little change to some of the code on ebay and didn't regression test it with all of the various netscape builds.

I'm not sure e-bay is even usable at all with Javascript turned off, but I know that Netscape can disable javascript in its configuration menus. Give that a try...

Probably not much can be done, Netscape 4 still had it's fair share of site crashing bugs like what you are seeing. I knew of a few other sites that could cause similar.

I've long since abandoned Netscape 4 in favor of Mozilla. It's a bit different, but is much better then Netscape 4 in many ways.

I think the problem is that netscape sucks.

There might be an option to turn the error messages off. I know there is in internet explorer. In fact, ie may be getting the same errors but seems to work ok because the error messages are turned off (I think off is the default in internet explorer).

I'm running Netscape 4.78/U.S. version for Solaris and I can go to an auction and back to the search results, but it does flash a javascript error and then finishes loading.
I do get auctions that never load past the auction header due to html errors in the auction TOS section.

I saw the same thing in IE6 yesterday checking Ebay from home. There was a JavaScript error in the status bar, then the page loaded normally. Maybe Ebay's trying something new that's smart enough to recover after a failure?

No the error is probably just not important enough to make a noticeable difference on the page.