Well, I'd been using Netscape successfully for the past 3 days with no problems.

Signed on just now and had no bulbs or shaded folders. Also it didn't remember my name & password when I came in to post this topic.

Still seems to work fine with IE though...I just prefer using Netscape 4.7

Netscape is full of bugs.

Recently I have been using both netscape navigator and internet explorer. I cannot say that IE crashes less often than navigator, and given Microsoft's track record they do not quite have a reputation for bug free products. Navigator is still my browser of choice.

Back to the original topic, for the last several days I have had no problem with the bulbs (on netscape).

Oh yeah IE crashes all the time. I was referring to just lots and lots of problems displaying content for Netscape. One big problem is they can't handle liks with spaces in them, so any photos with spaces in the filename screw up Netscape. Believe me, I know firsthand about bugs in software, especially Microsoft's.

Just noticed on a previous posting that the cookie problem has been solved on my Netscape Communicator, iMacOS9 system. I had my UserName and Password come up automatically for the first time in weeks. Hope it remains this way, but at least I have now memorized my password and don't have to look it up anymore! Thanks guys.

URLs cannot contain spaces. Blame the specification, but not the product which follows the specification.

Yup, at Microsoft we never had the attitude of "follow the specification." We always asked, "what does the customer want?" That's one thing that made us so successful, although to the consternation of many.

Of course having a monopoly never hurt too.

QL- I guess we can take your WORD on that!

BTW- This mornings ZDNet News opened my eyeballs especially quickly- NOT a good omen for Win2000!

According to the Microsoft memo, the Windows 2000 source-code base contains:

More than 21,000 "postponed" bugs, an indeterminate number of which Microsoft is characterizing as "real problems." Others are requests for new functionality, and others reflect "plain confusion as to how something is supposed to work."

More than 27,000 "BugBug" comments. These are usually notes to developers to make something work better or more efficiently. According to Microsoft, they tend to represent "unfinished work" or "long-forgotten problems."

Overall, there are more than 65,000 "potential issues" that could emerge as problems, as discovered by Microsoft's Prefix tool. Microsoft is estimating that 28,000 of these are likely to be "real" problems.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdhpnews01

Hey, what do you expect for $500 bucks?!

[This message has been edited by doc (edited 02-14-2000).]

Re: what the customer wants, I read a blurb about Bill Gates about how he formed a committee to look into what customers wanted, and then he buried the report.

Nobody can argue with success. The success of Microsoft shows that even a flawed standard is better than no standard. But for Microsoft, the only standard is Microsoft. Which is why they are killing open internet standards, java etc.

People who have never experienced Microsoft product development find it difficult to believe that their success is based on the tireless efforts of an astonishingly brilliant group of engineers. That's perhaps why Microsoft's competitors consistently underestimate them. As for Java, it was never anything but marketing hype. Cross-platform architectures have been tried many times over the decades, and the problems remain the same: speed, bugs, and inability to exploit one particular platform's unique features.

Killing "committee designs" was one of my favorite pastimes when I was lead developer at MS. They invariably stunk. There's a huge gulf between what customers really want and what a committee interviewing a focus group comes up with. The best way to engineer a product is for a really smart engineer who actually uses the product to mastermind the design. Microsoft's best products have come out of this process.

As for the bug list that invariably gets leaked with the release of each product, the explanation is pretty much dead on, although when you think "bug" you may be thinking "crash," which is likely not the case. The kinds of bugs that typically make it into a shipping product have to do with compatibility, speed, visual appearance, and just plain poorly thought-out functionality. Microsoft maintains an enourmous tracking database during product testing and each bug report is examined for severity and priority before being considered for deferral.

The main problem with W98 was third-party device drivers. Since Windows is an open standard, any hardware company can plug in special software to run their modems, printers, network cards, etc. The slightest bug in these, because of the Intel architecture, can cause the whole computer to crash. Of course there are some bugs in the MS internal software too that cause crashes, but the big problem is the proliferation of third-party software. W2K is supposed to fix that with much more stringent testing requirements. We shall see.

I guess the bottom line is that Netscape is full of bugs because they do not have an astonishingly brilliant group of engineers, and that Win2000 has a lot of bugs because Intel and third parties do not have an astonishingly brilliant group of engineers.

That about hits the nail on the head, PG.

Well no one can ever say that FTers don't have an excellent sense of humor!

BTW- QL, after all this time, I finally checked out your site. No wonder the name sounded a bit familiar! That's also, of course, why I'd made the rather silly pun above. Please accept my apologies!

QuietLion: You (will shortly) have mail.