Re: That whole Netscape problem...

doctor@fruitbat.org
Wed, 20 Jan 1999 16:27:02 -0800 (PST)


Ely Wilson said ...
>
> Netscape 4.x has been 'spontaneously shutting down' since as far as I can recall, on
> both Debian and RedHat, under 2.0 and 2.1 kernels. This is nothing kernel related,
> maybe indirectly if at all. This is a problem that should be taken up with Netscape
> (or whoever it is that manages the browser source code) since this has been a long
> standing problem among a great many users of all kernel versions.
>
> Maybe it uses a bad memory management scheme under Linux/Unix and it surfaces itself
> under Linux/X Windows. This is a posibility, but I wouldn't stick my neck out so
> far (on he lkml) and say it's kernel related, because tehre are MANY X apps that
> don't spontaneously close themselves. If it were a less centralized problem...
> well..

I find it interesting that many people have this problem with Netscape.
I've been running 4.51 for around 4 months (under 2.0.x) and never had it
hang or die. With previous releases of Netscape there was some
instability, but usually I just upgrade my libc and it settled down.
When Netscape was developed (as with most products) a certain environment
was used, ie: certain level of the kernel, libc, binutils, etc. Perhaps
Netscape should published the exact environment the product was built and
tested under as a way for people to figure out how their environment
differs.
Making a blanket statement that 'product XYZ will work with a 2.0
kernel' will almost always be false on someones system. And usually it's
environmental.

-- 
Peter A. Castro (doctor@fruitbat.org) or (pcastro@us.oracle.com)

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