[3274] in Release_7.7_team
Netscape 6 Unix - more information
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (t. belton)
Thu May 9 17:45:49 2002
Date: Thu, 9 May 2002 17:45:47 -0400 (EDT)
From: "t. belton" <tbelton@MIT.EDU>
To: <netscape-release@mit.edu>
cc: <release-team@mit.edu>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.30L.0205091728350.19255-100000@iphigenia.mit.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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The short message here is, if you are a user who goes back and forth
between Unix platforms, expect trouble. The rest of this is just details
for testers.
Sun has chosen to do its porting/wrapping of Mozilla in a number of ways
which are, shall we say, not the way Netscape would have chosen to do it.
Normally I am no Netscape apologist, but the fact is that the Linux
Netscape (maintained by Netscape) has run better "straight out of the
box," and looks cleaner, than the Sun Netscape (maintained by Sun) has
after several days of pounding and tweaking ... not counting the month or
more it took to get running in the first place!
- Both the Sun version and the Linux version have a routine they want to
go through to convert old prefs and/or initialize settings if they do not
detect a .mozilla/version file in your home dir.
However, the Sun version regards the Linux version as an "older version of
Mozilla" (never mind that the Sun version is older at the moment) and
warns you about incompatible prefs.
- The Linux version, if run first, will put its new look (round blue
buttons) in by default. If you run the Sun version after this, it will
splice in these blue-button graphics over the old window design, and look
horrible. If you run the Sun version first, when you run the Linux version
the old button designs will be spliced in at the wrong size and there'll
be mysterious blank spaces in the toolbar. Either way, it's ugly.
- The Sun version ignores many prefs because it is apparently STILL trying
to read prefs from an improper path somewhere, that I have not been able
to root out. For example, the infoagents Sun version cannot run Instant
Messenger - it doesn't know the AIM server or port number (despite these
prefs being visible). But my locally-installed version, where I have just
let Sun keep everything where it wants, lets you log in.
- The Sun version has some mysterious setting that sends it back to
sun.com instead of your chosen homepage every few starts. (On the other
hand, the Linux "activation" sequence on first startup tries to spam you.
All things are equal.)
One thing is clear: We are going to be faced with, not just a few
brand-new prefs files, but a completely different prefs DIRECTORY TREE -
neither version reads anything in ~/.netscape except on first conversion.
All prefs, history, etc are kept in ~/.mozilla now. Take note.
