Festing lag

Begin: Thursday, May 6, 1999 22:39

Submitted: Thursday, May 6, 1999 22:59

Here it is, 2240, and I haven't even started packing. Or done much of anything else, for that matter. Tomorrow, the glorious journey back home will begin, and I find myself absolutely unprepared.

For the past several hours, I have been testing the Mozilla M5 release. It is a dramatic improvement over any previous versions I've seen. For the first time, I've been able to see first hand what all the buzz is about. (Always before, it would either be so horribly slow that I'd give up, or it would crash before I even had the chance.) Despite some nasty bugs which remain, it looks to be a totally awesome browser.

I first took it for a spin on Bitscape's Lair, and it rendered everything I threw at it flawlessly. Then, I wandered over to Slashdot. Not a problem. There is a nasty bug in the keyboard scrolling such that when you use the arrow keys, the texts gets totally mangled. It's better than no keyboard support at all, which is what it was on my last attempt.

I spent several minutes drooling over the demo pages which show off all the new capabilities. Avesome stuff. Nested scrolling regions, opacity tags on images (very awesome!), support for client-side sorting and different display styles for a book list, and tables galore. I can hardly wait until this thing is released, so I can start writing content to take advantage of the new features. Oh, one other thing. The binary tarball I downloaded was less than half as large as the Netscape 4.X tarball. 4.7 megs. Not bad at all. And of course, it uses gtk, instead of the antiquated craptif. Oh yeah.

If it weren't for the fact that I couldn't get it to do http authentication, I'd be typing this using M5. Unfortunately, I guess they haven't implemented that yet. When that comes, and the strange scrolling bugs get fixed, it'll be time to send Netscape 4 the way of /dev/null. :)

So, there you have it. That's what I've been doing in lieu of getting anything important done for the past 5 hours. Oh yeah, I spent part of that time reading a wondefully entertaining flamewar on Slashdot. Using Mozilla, of course. Linux vs Be, the saga begins. Looks like if this heats up much more, it'll reach KDE vs GNOME proportions. What fun.

I shall now attempt to motivate my sluggish body to do something which will advance my state of readiness when the time comes to return to the wonderful Louisville Compound tomorrow.