Eugene Tyurin wrote:
Oh, gee, I wish I knew what I started last night... :-(
Well, I guess it's time I weighed in on this subject :-)
IMHO the folks at Mozilla are trying their best in a thankless task.
The potential for problems in any internet related application is huge.
Remember - they are trying to make a browser that, on the one hand,
supports the W3C standards and on the other hand, can view pages that
are being constructed by people who have never heard of those standards.
I tried M13 and M15 (both HUGE d/ls on a dial-up connection). I was
impressed with the promise they were showing, but unimpressed with the
error handling capability.
I don't profess to be even a stain on a programmers' underpants yet,
(first term of Software Development, VB (bleech!) and Python (Yay!), but
one of the first basic principles we were taught was to make sure you
have sufficient error traps so that, if something happens that can't be
handled, the program recovers or, at least, exits gracefully, not
*crashing*.
With the work I do (teaching, as well as 'studenting') I need software
stability. That is why I went to Linux initially, particularly the SuSE
distro. Since a lot of my PC work is on the web, I need something that
can a) have a lot of windows open, b) handle some bloody awful sites, c)
that I can start a big d/l in, turn the monitor off and go to bed, and
have a better than even chance that the d/l will be completed when I get
up.
Netscape ain't great, but it'll do most of the above (except a: and
sometimes b: and occasionally c:). :-)
Lately, for ftp stuff, I've started using Midnight Commander.
If Moz could set a particular milestone and optimise that level to a
good, solid, workable browser (forget all the animation, Flash plugins,
etc, etc.), I for one would be grateful.
I firmly believe they are trying too hard to find the holy grail of web
browsers. It will never exist, because the medium changes too often.
Get a functional, reliable base product first. Then go chasing the
latest developments.
I would dearly like to be in a position to help with the development of
Mozilla, but first I have to eat!
Well, that's my rant for today (unless I find something further down the
mail list!)
This Email is 100% Virus Free!
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Regards Don Hansford
ECKYTECH COMPUTING/
SQIT Warwick