May 15, 2001

Non-Braindead Developers Needed, Apply Within
   by stacy <pfftnet@stacy.pfft.net>

Well, don't apply here. Apply to work with Microsoft or Netscape, or stay at your old job where you do your non-braindead work and do some pro bono work for the Open Source movement with the Mozilla project. I'm getting tired of web browsers that suck! I use a Sun running Solaris 8 at work, and MS IE is supposedly available for Solaris, I've been told that it doesn't work with anything higher than Solaris 2.6. Even if I could use it, I think the moral objections to IE would be enough to keep me from using it, especially in such a hypocritical manner as on the Solaris platform.

I have been using Netscape 4.77, which crashes far too often. I'll give you an example. I read Wired News every morning. Wired is a very slow site sometimes, and it has a lot of ads and graphics on the front page, so hitting Stop and letting the story load before everything else helps. Well that consistently crashes Netscape 4.77. Just kills the window and the process with a Bus Error, whatever that means. I also use Netscape 4 at home, where I use Linux, and it's a little better, but then I don't surf much at home. It's a resource hog in both places, and certainly it sucks the memory and CPU cycles out of the computer if it's running Windows. I have a friend who has to reboot all the time because she's running so many Netscape windows on her PC, but she says IE makes it have to reboot a lot, too.

So lately I've switched to Netscape 6 at work. This program is less likely to crash than the previous version, and it has a better look and feel to it. However, it still needs a lot of work. Javascript support is spotty, as is Java support, and it doesn't display all pages very well. It uses twice the memory that Netscape 4 used. But overall, I prefer it. I tried Mozilla at home, which is basically the Open Source equivalent of Netscape 6. It has no Java support at this time, but it looks almost identical to Netscape 6. I think it will be a good product once it's out of beta and to a real version with features that make it comparable to older Netscape versions and IE. It's just taking them a very long time to get these programs working. With the poor Javascript support in Netscape 6, I'm not sure I would feel comfortable calling it a non-beta release.

There's my call to all you developers out there. Go write some decent code to make web browsers better. I'm tired of all these lousy ones using up all my resources. I'd go back to using lynx if that was a very practical option.

Published: May 15, 2001
Editor: stacy