Re: Possible solution to Netscape crashing problem (was Re: Release-critical Bugreport for January 7, 2000)

[Greg Stark <gsstark@mit.edu>]

Stefan Gybas <stefan@gybas.com> writes:

> The libc6 version of Netscape crashes when you close one of its windows or
> try to quit the program since the X libs were compiled using egcs/gcc 2.95.

Unfortunately that's the least of the problems. For many people it crashes
whenever you start Java, run javascript while it's decoding a gif, or just
randomly every few minutes (if you're lucky).

There seems to be very little pattern between who it crashes for and who it
doesn't. But I just got a hunch, People who find the glibc netscape unusably
unstable or totally rock solid: How fast a net connection do you have?

I think my problems with netscape coincided with getting a faster net
connection. I remember being able to use it fairly reliably on my 14.4kbps,
and now it's completely unusable on an ADSL line. 

This would make perfect sense if the race condition were between the rendering
engine and the network layer. On the 14.4 the rendering engine could probably
always finish parsing the data before the next packet came in and everything
was idle when the network layer tried to interrupt.

Well, just a hunch, I would be curious to know if there's any correlation.


-- 
greg