Re: Woody Impressions
Hello,
Re Netscape->Mozilla, just one warning to Netscape Mail users:
*** DON'T SWITCH TO MOZILLA! ***
At least, not yet. I made this mistake, and want to warn everyone else
not to, as loudly as possible. Mozilla is approaching stability, but it
is not there yet, it is not beta quality, it is barely alpha quality.
Why? The mail browser is painfully slow, it can take ten to twenty
seconds just to switch folders, or file messages. This is true on my
160 MHz 603e, but also on a Celeron 333 laptop. The widgets are *all*
very slow, on the browser or the mail windows, because they open GTK+
widgets and then draw their own on top. Everything is slow, except the
rendering engine, whose dynamic re-layout of pages is quite impressive
(even on the 603e, and this is a huge win with any system using a
modem), but everything else is quite slow. Like, why does it take so
much longer than Netscape to load pages, even from the disk, when it can
lay them out so fast?
Moving on, Mozilla imports your old Netscape settings and email, but
doesn't yet import your old Netscape address book, or your old Netscape
Mail filters. (The former can be exported from Netscape to a .ldif,
then imported into Mozilla, the latter has to be imported by hand!)
Searching the address book is terrible, you pretty much have to scroll
up and down until you find what you want (unlike Netscape's awesome
isearch-like facility). The program is a MEMORY HOG, eating 25-30 MB at
startup and growing to 50-70 MB over time, so swapping stuff in and out
is a lot of what kills its performance (especially on my 64 MB laptop).
And it never seems to free memory, even when you quit all windows except
one; Netscape was the same way, like one big memory leak. What happened
to promises of fast and lean?
And it gets worse. There is no way to quote original messages in a
reply. Password Manager is broken, it does not remember POP passwords,
and does not seem to remember any others- View Stored Passwords does
absolutely nothing. If you do not visit an old Mail folder before
filtering mail into it, Mozilla will often disregard the old stuff there
and build its summary file from only the new stuff, so when you visit
the folder, it will look like it only has the new messages. This is
okay, just quit Mozilla, delete the corresponding .msf file, restart,
visit the folder, and it will generate a new .msf from scratch with old
and new messages.
The worst: I tried to compact all folders, and Mozilla crashed partway,
deleting one of my folders! Fortunately I still had the old Netscape
folder around, so I copied it in, visited it, and all was well- except
the last ten days' worth of email that had filtered into that folder!
I've generated crashes so many ways I've lost count.
A number of other things are not quite as broken, just "different",
enough to be annoying (like, going through an extra layer of folders
when you try to file messages, useless "Local Folders", no ShockWave
plugin, pays no attention to "Prefers HTML" address book field, asks you
whether you still want to use this application to open this mime type-
*every time* you load a file of that type, etc.). But there are just
enough new features to counteract those differences and make it worth it
once it's all stable (like the amazing layout engine, a "Prefers plain
text" address book field, uh, there were some others but I forgot
them). And I've found it to be *almost* as stable on PPC as on Intel,
which is pretty significant!
So Mozilla is not at all beta quality, rumors to the contrary
notwithstanding. RedHat will someday replace Netscape 4.x with it, but
not now, not until a lot of these issues are resolved- at least if
they're smart. It is slow, Slow, SLOW, a memory PIG, and not at all
stable enough to be considered "beta" quality.
You've been warned.
Zeen,
-Adam P.
GPG fingerprint: D54D 1AEE B11C CE9B A02B C5DD 526F 01E8 564E E4B6
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