Netscape 6.. ohmygod...

[Michael Vanecek]

I tried and vommited NN6 months ago. NN6 on both Linux and MSWindows 
platforms are abysmal. What do you expect from a "Release" level product 
based on v0.6 code? AOL should be keel-hauled for that pathetic blunder. 
NN6 doesn't qualify as a "Release", much less the greatly exagerated 
version number of 6. Sure, go from a relatively stable 4.76 that 
actually worked, bypass 5 altogether and jump straight to 6 with a buggy 
as hell pre-alpha application. Nothing AOL has done has been good for 
Netscape. They fired most of the staff when they bought it, then they 
release 6 purely out of fear that MS would do the same with their 
product - something that is alien to the OSS world, and even now they're 
working a deal with MS to use the IE browser rather than their own 
Netscape which they spent how much for? I call that lack of direction 
and blatent confusion and we're suffering for it. People who read that 
NN6 was based on Open Source Mozilla now think all OSS software is crap. 
Bad move. From a paranoid point of view - a move to purposefully give 
meat to the FUD we have to face. </rant>

On Linux, I went straight from Netscape 4.76 to Mozilla 0.9 (after a 
brief nightmare with NN6). Mozilla has gotten stable enough to use as my 
primary browser. I can live with the few little quirks - they're not 
critical. 0.91 has given me a little trouble on installing by xpi 
(anyone else?) so I'll stick with 0.9 until 0.92 comes out. No AOL 
cosmetics, no proprietory software and links stuck in - it's nice. And 
CSS support is awesome. Websites I used to visit all the time in NN4.76 
have all but transformed into much improved works. My CapitalOne site 
needs to pull their heads out, but for the most part, all sites work 
with it. I'm on a k6-2 500 with 384Mb ram and RH6.2/Ximian Gnome. I've 
had it on client's 900+ Athlons and there's no perceptable lag - very 
quick. It's quick enough on my humble system - bookmarks are a little 
slow, but I do have several thousand bookmarks. Email also is a little 
slow getting initialized, but I have over 60 thousand emails too. 
Naturally, Mozilla will only get faster as development progresses to 
v1.0 - why bother then with Netscape? If Netscape is based on Mozilla, 
why not ditch Netscape altogether (heck, it's a product from a company 
we love to hate anyway), for the original, and superior Mozilla? It 
would appear that AOL will probably ditch Netscape themselves. Luckily, 
Mozilla will survive and the few remaining Netscape engineers will get 
better jobs...

Anyone here doing XUL programming? Documentation is still in its infancy 
and I'm intensly interested in learning how to program with it...

Mike

Jason wrote:

> Has anyone ecer experienced a properly working Netscape 6??
> 
> Please tell me its not this bad. 
> 
> It was incapable of even loading .gif images properly - showing only
> the lefthand side of one on the SIMPLEST of web pages - no forms,
> tables - just HTML. 
> 
> When I'd click on a link, sometimes it would go where it ought to,
> sometimes I went to a totally arbitrary URL based on a random chunk of
> text in the HTML somewhere totally else. 
> 
> Sometimes the URL in the window, and the one it requested from my
> localhost server were different, typically it would repeat a
> subdirectory name or two. Click reload though, and it would load the
> right page. 
> 
> I would recommend ANY Microsoft OS with ANY Microsoft browser before
> what I have just seen in Netscape 6 under Linux.
> 
> Yet, it doesnt segfault. Why? Is it due to the highly trained idiots
> at America Online that we have such a stable yet buggy piece of
> software here? I cannot imagine how these horrid problems can occur in
> software that wont simply die, unles they ARE NOT BY ACCIDENT. AOL has
> been in bed with MS for quite some time now.
> 
> 



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