Re: killing old netscapes
On Sat, 21 Oct 2000, Daniel Barclay wrote:
>
> > From: Dwight Johnson <dwj@aaronsrod.com>
>
> > [Netscape] is a piece of
> > shoddy and amateurish programming that is a disgrace to the profession.
You have misquoted me, sir. I _never_ referred globally to Netscape as "... a
piece of shoddy and amateurish programming". That is emphatically not true
and I will not have you put those words in my mouth.
On the contrary, Netscape is a highly useful application with many
admirable features. It has been my exclusive Web browser over the past five
years and I have personally found it immensely useful. I have the greatest
respect for its programmers who, I am certain, are professionals of great
skill and experience.
_My_ reference was to one loop inside Netscape which hogs system resources
and can crash a system when it is unable to continue communication with
a remote host. Below is _precisely_ what _I_ said:
"Netscape goes into a tight, infinite and load crushing loop when it is
trying to access data from a remote Web site and the data it is expecting
does not come back for one reason or another. It may be because your ppp
connection died or for some reason the remote site is not sending the data.
A Netscape in this loop will not allow you to communicate with it by
clicking on its 'Stop' button or any other control. Such a process must
usually be dealt with using 'kill -s 9 PID' or it will eventually hog all
your system resources and force you to reboot. Sometimes you can get it to
stop and take an exception exit by killing your pppd.
"... An infinite loop like this can easily be given a timeout and allow the
'Stop' event and other navigation events to take place. It is a piece of
shoddy and amateurish programming that is a disgrace to the profession."
Netscape for Linux has many problems, but we must be ever thankful to the
programmers who, working as volunteers and without pay, produced a free
Netscape for Linux from a time several years before Netscape open-sourced
its code and embraced the Free Software movement.
Dwight
--
Dwight Johnson
dwj@aaronsrod.com
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