[3133] in Release_7.7_team
Re: Need to know if migration to Netscape 6 is feasible.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Tue Feb 12 20:22:36 2002
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
To: Bill Cattey <wdc@mit.edu>
Cc: release-team@mit.edu, owls@mit.edu
In-Reply-To: <QwOOkqNz0001Jgrp4J@mit.edu>
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Date: 12 Feb 2002 20:22:32 -0500
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On Tue, 2002-02-12 at 18:58, Bill Cattey wrote:
> Does the "save file/hit the ".." button too often/hang browser" problem
> exist in Netscape 6?
Almost certainly.
> If so, will deploying Open AFS with dynroot be
> feasible?
Right now, we plan to deploy openafs with dynroot on Solaris and Linux
for Athena 9.1. There are no technical obstacles I know of to deploying
it on IRIX, but we would really like to not touch anything close to the
IRIX kernel if at all possible.
On the other hand, people live with the "hit the .. button too
often/hang application" bug for many applications on all platforms right
now (I'm not sure why it would be any better for netscape 4 than
netscape 6, for instance), so I'm not sure that's a show-stopper.
> Are there any show-stoppers for Netscape 6.1 assuming that the
> Certificate fixes that jis promises for other platforms will work for
> Unix?
(Can't help here.)
> Longer term, I think a strategic relationship with Mozilla will work
> better for us than with Netscape. But the installed base of Netscape
> software, and
> mindshare around the benefits of running something that acts line
> Netscape but is called Mozilla seems to be an issue requiring effort to
> overcome.
As long as we continue to have our default web browser maintained in the
infoagents locker by Todd, I think it makes reasonable sense to use
Netscape 6.x binary releases unless we run into serious problems with
them which we wouldn't run into with Mozilla. Getting bug-fixes a
little slower isn't usually a serious problem for us.
If we ever want to put our default web browser into the release (which
is, as I've said before, a whole lot more continuing effort than the way
we do things now, but would provide better opportunities to fix bugs and
usability issues as they arise, and would also allow the web browser to
live completely on local disk on Linux), then we should use Mozilla;
binary-only products are a pain to deal with in the release. If the
directors need it explained to them that Mozilla == Netscape for all
practical purposes, then we should do that explaining or punt on putting
mozilla in the release.
