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

[A F Murphy]

Yes, Netscape does email - I'm using that right now. And that's where I
think a couple of annoying things were fixed - not major problems, just
- annoyances.

I have only encountered Opera a few years ago, when someone was strongly
suggesting my father use it, as it was supposed to be much better with
low vision. I was never really sure if it helped, because low vision was
only half his problem with computers - the other was that he still
expected them to act the way they did when he first used one, in 1947...
  it was never completely clear what he did, but every time he went near
one, it had a nervous breakdown. So his use wasn't really a valid test
of software... but the man suggesting it, who was an end user geek who
was doing (other than Dad) a great job of convincing people in their 80s
of the marvels of computers, thought very highly of it. It was an
interesting group - he had people who'd never gone near one, people who
had used them long ago, people who'd helped develop them and could trace
programming languages back through time to the ones they'd first learned
when they programmed when rocks were soft, people who were recent
converts and - oh, what do you call them - the ones who always have the
newest and latest technology... all in their 70s and older. Oh, and my
mom, who was avoiding them because she didn't want to spend her days
doing Dad's word processing... *G*

Anne

Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius wrote:

> Also sprach Gorgeous Muiredach:
>
>>
>> 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
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