[3454] in Release_7.7_team
Re: Mozilla multiple instances
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (t. belton)
Fri Sep 6 16:37:13 2002
Date: Fri, 6 Sep 2002 16:37:10 -0400 (EDT)
From: "t. belton" <tbelton@MIT.EDU>
To: William Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
cc: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>, <release-team@MIT.EDU>
In-Reply-To: <9488BF00-C1D6-11D6-8678-000393995C5C@mit.edu>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.33L.0209061629530.7828-100000@iphigenia.mit.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
On Fri, 6 Sep 2002, William Cattey wrote:
> I am concerned that the vast majority of Athena users logout without
> consistently killing their browser, and that olc is gonna be swamped by
> calls from people saying, "I used Mozilla yesterday, and now it doesn't
> show me my web pages. It asks me something about a profile." When all
> that's happening is that they logged out without shutting down Mozilla
> from the Athena workstation next door.
>
> Remember, to most users this stuff is all magic, they expect it to clean
> itself up no matter how ungracefully stuff is shut down. They have no
> concept when logging out is or is not an ok way to quit a program. And
> they DONT use the same machine every day like we do.
This is all making my head hurt. Mozilla's IMAP handling is not working at
all as expected, it's given me the first genuinely frozen windows I have
ever had with this browser ... and meanwhile I'm having a discussion over
on the other computer about how much we need to hold the user's hands.
Again, not actually disagreeing with you, but for heaven's sake, can't
they read what the dialog says?
Netscape 4, as rbasch just pointed out to me, had a dialog dealing with
this which was rather more useful. It said "Hey, it looks to me like
you've got a copy of Netscape running somewhere else and I don't know if
that's for real - what do you want me to do about it?" What he didn't
realize, until I just told him, was that WE did that dialog, not Netscape
- it was in the wrapper.
I was hoping I wouldn't have to put it in the wrapper again. It strikes me
as having to go to extraordinary lengths, adding in more glop to make a
message dialog, just to allow the users to keep being stupid. But if
that's what it takes, I will.
Look: Let me try first to make the dialogs more responsive, either by
changing what Mozilla's own dialogs say in the chrome or by adding a
helpful message of our own. I'll do that and you can evaluate it for
user-comprehensibility.
If that doesn't seem to handle the problem, then we can figure out a way
to clean up Mozilla's trash on logout, which still strikes me as the wrong
way to do this.
Is that fair?
And it's not going to happen today, at least not until I finish figuring
out what's ailing IMAP.
