On Tue, Feb 13, 2001 at 09:18:31PM +0000, Rev Simon Rumble wrote:
> <bitch>
> Why didn't Mozilla concentrate on writing a good web browser instead
> of a mail reader, news reader, Swiss Army Knife and kitchen sink?
> </bitch>
Well, if their toolkits were a bit more efficient, it would
actually be one of (if not the) nicest MUAs available for Unix,
IMHO. As it is, it's pretty but slow. It does IMAP fairly
nicely (but so does TkRat), it does MIME, and displays images
in-line (so does TkRat). It finds URLs and turns them into
hyperlinks (so does TkRat). It displays HTML messages in-line.
You can argue against that all you like, but sometimes it's
useful, and the popularity of such things is only likely to
increase. It doesn't do PGP, which is a bit of a drag.
Anyone know of a better MUA (in the gestalt
aesthetic/functionality sense)?
I use slrn for news, but miss the ability to click on URLs. So
I went and built PAN, on a recommendation from the BPA linux
newsgroup. Yeah, it's fairly pretty, but the traditional
newsreader use of "spacebar" to mean "do the next obvious thing"
is gone. It's significantly more painful to actually use than
slrn, and *it doesn't do URL finding/activation*! What's the
point of that? That should be a given, in this day and age.
> Now can someone tell me why when one Mozilla locks up, it locks up
> everything? I mean the news reader, all other Mozilla windows,
> everything? Shouldn't they be quite seperate applications?
The trouble here is that it seems that they've built their own
platform-independance shim/aka MozillaOS, on which all of the
other stuff is built. If that crashes or locks-up, then
naturally your whole MozillaOS platform and everything running
on it is locked up. Crappy design, I agree. Their project
goals are much larger than we're looking for here, though,
because they care about working on Windows and Macintosh and VMS
and whatever, and we just don't.
--
Andrew
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