On 31 Oct 1999, Chris G. Demetriou wrote:

> Jukka Marin <jmarin@pyy.jmp.fi> writes:
> > I've been trying to find a working Netscape version fir NetBSD 1.4.1 / i386
> > but all versions (FreeBSD/BSDi, 4.6, 4.7) seem to keep crashing all the time.
> > I'm downloading the linux version now, but I doubt it will do any good.
> > 
> > It seems that some specific WWW sites make Netscape crash almost immediately.
> > Too bad these sites are the ones we'd like to read every day... ;)
> 
> personally, I've been using the communicator out of pkgsrc, and it
> seems no less stable than, say, navigator of approximately on win32.
> Unfortunately, that doesn't say as much as one would hope...

  I mostly agree, though I think Java and JavaScript support are buggier
in non-Windows versions and I suspect the sites you visit have more
JavaScript then most.  I highly recommend turning off both unless you
really need them.  If the sites are designed properly, you should not
notice much difference.  If not, then they may be completely unuseable :(. 

  Other then that, the only bug I frequently encounter in NetBSD that does
not appear on NT is the truncating of long select lists in forms
(sometimes it lets you go to "more", sometimes it doesn't).  On both
NetBSD and NT it crashes quite often with the chance of a crash directly
proportional to the number of windows you use at the same time. 

  Also, Netscape often freezes for relatively long periods of time
(especially with multiple windows -- and they all freeze), so just because
it is not doing anything does not necessarily mean it is dead.  I've seen
Netscape freeze for over a minute, and I quite frequently see it freeze
between 5 and 20 seconds. 

Matthew Orgass
darkstar@pgh.net