[Sca-cooks] a question for the geeks- OT-OOP

[Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Gorgeous Muiredach:
>>Is anyone using Netscape 7 yet? Do you have an opinion? I really need to
>>upgrade (_if_ the computer will let me, and that is a big if) but every
>>time a new version comes out I hear lots of screaming and yelling. So is 7
>>the AntiChrist or is 6 still holding the title?
>
>Do yourself a favour, and go for a *real* browser <grin>  And I'm not
>talking Internet Explorer either.
>
>Opera.  The best there is.  Small download (2.5Mb) quick loading, designed
>to render HTML the way it is supposed to, without appropriatary tags.  Does
>not belong to a giant (Netscape=AOL...)  Good stuff.  There even is a FREE
>version :-)
>
>http://www.opera.com
>
>Try it, you'll like it :-)

Opera is great, but doesn't do email unless you use one of the
web-based mail services (they offered one, last time I checked,
especially made to be used with Opera). Unless things have changed
pretty recently. Does Netcape 7 have a built-in email client? I STR
Netscape 6 did, and kind of assume it does, since they figure to
become, essentially, the AOL browser for those people that don't use
AOL. My other objection to Opera is that its speed is based in part
on the caching of pages (true geeks place that cache in RAM), and if
your computer isn't a racehorse, it can take forever to exit from
Opera, as it writes those pages to your hard disk cache upon exit.
Taking that into account (and words cannot express my shame as I
write this), Internet Explorer, for all its monopolistic, proprietary
and security weirdness, is probably either as fast or faster. At
least with my particular setup, it is.

For all that, though, Opera is, as Tobey Maguire might say,
"extremely cool." I especially liked its ability to pretend to be
other browsers, for those persnickety websites that won't let you on
unless you're using Netscape or IE. Which is ironic, since Netscape
users probably still have their browsers identified by servers as
Mozilla anyway (Netscape mail client users, check your headers to
confirm this).

iCab, for the Mac, used to be kinda cute. Fast, small, and not
dependent on disk caching for speed; it just had a very limited and
very efficient instruction set. I'm not sure if they're still around;
I got tired of waiting for an official release in English. ;-)

>Alternatively, you could try Mozilla, which is also real small and quick,
>but, IMHO, less friendly to use.
>
>http://www.mozilla.com

And it is also the latest beta version of whatever will become the
next build of Netscape... For those interested in this stuff, once
upon a time there was a browser called Mosaic, which was a lovely,
state-of-the-art piece of Open Source software (which meant you
could, in theory, get the code the software was based on, and rewrite
the program, both to suit your own needs and to improve the piece in
general, same as for the OS Linux -- and it was legal). Mosaic,
around the time Netscape was born, was in the process of making huge
advances, of creating a super-Mosaic, a Mosaic-Zilla... and then
Netscape bought them out, keeping the designers of Mozilla chained up
in the basement to create new, beta versions of Netscape. Mozilla
became Netscape Navigator (and later Communicator), and Mozilla
continued to be produced as an alpha version of Netscape. Still in
Open Source code, so users could refine each build as per their needs
and perspective, then send the changes in to Mosaic's labs to be
examined and, often, added to the next version of Mozilla, and later,
Netscape. In general, what this means is that Mozilla tends to have
the instability of an alpha release, but is, by definition, pretty
much always one step ahead of Netscape. Sometimes it makes a big
difference, sometimes, not.

Adamantius