"John D. Giorgis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
>Actually, I thought that Jackson argued that MS subtly designed Windows to
>cause Netscape to crash. It installs just fine, sure, it just won't run
>for very long once you get it on there.
Various versions of Netscape were (and presumably still are) part of the
test suites for the OS. The OS wouldn't ship if an app as popular as
Netscape wasn't thoroughly tested. My hypothesis for the behavior you saw
would be that the Netscape code base through version 4 was a mess. The fact
that they threw it away and wrote v6 from scratch should be telling.
There's a lovely internal site at MS which details the lengths various OS
teams have had to go through to identify bugs in 3rd party apps (e.g.
allocate all available memory to see how much there is; ignore the
documentation and assume the size and usage of a memory structure) and
implement workarounds *in the OS* to identify these flaky apps and support
them; simply telling the public "hey, the app you like was written by
monkeys" isn't going to fly. It would be absolutely insane for the OS to be
intentionally unstable.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by
incompetence."
Joshua
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