[aclug-L] Re: The Future

[Tom Hull <thull@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

John Goerzen wrote:
> If you want a bit more detail, check out my paper at
> http://www.complete.org/papers/fsethics/

I got stuck on the section on Mozilla, where you write:

> Since that time, Mozilla has taken off. It now has features to make
> the Internet more accessible to people. Mozilla uses less memory
> than other browsers, and yet can do more. It is conceivable that
> Mozilla will be small enough to provide full-featured Internet
> access on palm-sized computers in the near future. Mozilla has
> features to speed web browsing by 30%. Developers have ported
> Mozilla to a huge number of different types and architectures of
> computers even though Mozilla has yet to be released as a finished
> product. There are already many people that can use the Web that
> could not before. 

Wow. Is that really true?

My impression had been that mozilla.org has pretty much been a bust.
According to a July 7 1999 "state of the lizard" report, 80% of the
development was still being done by Netscape/AOL engineers. The
latest schedule is aiming for function complete in 12/99, with
alpha and beta testing after that. The page on Binaries is still
more ominous. It says:

   We make binary versions of of Mozilla available for testing purposes
   only! They are not stable or complete enough for daily usage. We put
   them here for you to try out and report the bugs you find. Its
   guaranteed that you'll find bugs. Lots of them. 

   It is very important that you understand that these binaries are not
   complete programs. They might crash on startup. They might delete
   all your files and cause your computer to burst into flames. Our
   binaries also include time bombs: they will expire, and stop working,
   30 days after the date at which they were built. This is because we
   know that they are buggy, and we don't want people to continue to
   use them for very long. If you choose to run the nightly builds,
   you should be prepared to upgrade them often.

They also note that the binaries have 30-day expiry dates, to force
users to update often. I'm not sure we should count these chicks
until they hatch.

-- 
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 * Tom Hull -- mailto:thull@xxxxxxxxxxx or thull@xxxxxxxxxx
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