[3480] in Release_7.7_team
Athena web browser changes
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Wed Sep 11 21:31:22 2002
Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2002 21:31:18 -0400
Message-Id: <200209120131.VAA22989@error-messages.mit.edu>
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
To: release-announce@MIT.EDU
On the evening of September 23 we plan to put out a patch release
which will, among other things, change Athena's default web browser on
Solaris and IRIX. There will be a regular announcement about the
patch release some time next week, but we want to call attention to
this highly visible change ahead of time.
After exploring Netscape 6.x and finding fatal problems with its
configuration handling as it applies to our environment, we settled on
Mozilla 1.0 as the default browser for the Athena Unix platform.
Since Mozilla is the basis for Netscape 6 and up, it should be very
familiar to users of recent Netscape versions. Using Mozilla also
gives us greater control over the quality of the user experience, in
the long run. (However, we may reevaluate the tradeoffs at some
future date in light of Netscape 7.)
The specific behavior changes in the new patch release will be:
* The web browser launcher in the panel will launch Mozilla instead
of Netscape. The icon will change accordingly (it will be the
Mozilla icon with "WWW" below it, instead of the Netscape icon
with "Netscape" below it).
* Actions which bring up a web page (selecting an informational item
from the panel menu, clicking on a URL in Evolution, etc.) will
default to bringing up the page in Mozilla, unless Netscape is
already running.
* Workstations will sync Mozilla to local disk from the infoagents
locker, as they currently do with Netscape.
Typing "netscape" will continue to bring up Netscape 4, although a
dialog will inform users that mozilla is now the recommended browser.
IRIX will remain unaffected for now.
If you have any questions or comments, please send mail to
release-team@mit.edu.
