Re: BofA+Netscape

[db@Tadpole.COM (Doug Barnes)]

> 
>     Date: Sun, 11 Dec 1994 00:51:46 -0500
>     From: Amanda Walker <amanda@intercon.com>
>     
>     It's my personal feeling that Netscape doesn't have the right talent mix to
>     develop *any* Internet software, secure or not.
> 
> Well, I can't and won't attempt to speak to the overall mix of talent,
> however I think that such a strong statement really needs to be
> accompanied by some sort of an explanation.

I'll throw in that from the perspective of someone running a server,
their approach of requesting all graphics simultaneously over 
different sockets in the name of client performance is disastrous. 
This causes most servers to fork N times more per page, where N is 
the avg. # of graphics.  Not that this shouldn't eventually be dealt 
with by some way to request the whole ball of wax in a single package, 
but some have speculated that this was done deliberately in order 
sabotage server software other than their own. (Their original 
business model, as I understand it, was to give clients away for
free and sell server software.)

Also, their flip-flops on what they plan to charge for, and what
will be free... for instance, they initially lead folks to believe that 
the client would be free, encouraging many to adopt it, only to find 
out that later versions would only be free for a narrowly drawn group 
of individuals. I have nothing against shareware/demoware, when it is
clearly labelled as such... this is just mildly slimy. 

I will say though, that their Windows version crashes substantially 
less than the NCSA one, which is increasingly my metric for stuff I
inflict on my users. Fortunately, there are a _lot_ of other commercial
options coming out that I can chose from on the basis of price,
performance, not crashing, trust in the developers' integrity, etc. 

Doug