>>>In the meantime IE is pre-installed.
Which is a huge advantage. Both IE and communicator have humongous install procedures, replete with restarts and downloads from the net.
However, since IE is bundled with Windows, you don't need to go through much of it. The OEM or MS pre-installs it. They don't even force you to give up a credit card number to get web access, as the early MSN seemed to do.
I installed Communicator last night, and it took hours, even though I did the initial download over ISDN. After installing it I had to download all the bits recommended by the smart update program over a modem, and some of those bits were huge. Not to mention one of them insisted on using my 350 meg C drive, which is already completely full of Windows/system stuff and has 5 megs left, so that part failed.
Also, I had to figure out why things were so different from nav 3.x the hard way, and communicator lost my pop server and other mail settings, though it found everything else. I had a heck of a time figuring out how to get an email notification flag again, and I'm still not sure I have it right.
Maybe Netscape isn't aware that it *has* to do this *better* than Microsoft, because they will be wiped out by the time the Justice pepartment gets Microsoft to leave off the bundling otherwise. If they don't have the most popular browser or nearly so, then buying servers from them will be just like buying servers from O'Reilly. Maybe a good idea, but something you have to justifiy to management in detail.
BTW, if AOL can send me a CD with this kind of stuff on it every 5 minutes, why can't Netscape? So far I've given them about $400 bucks for this and that. You'd think a current $0.25 CD with $0.20 of postage once in a while would not be too much to ask. At least they could send these to anybody who had ever paid for the stuff they got over the net, thus proving that they are 'good for it.'
On the good side I really like the new fonts. And many of the new features look good too.
Grumpily Yours,
Chaz |
