Netscape Hangs

Myself and a few others are experiencing problems with Netscape 4.7.

We are all on physically different machines, with different OSs (NT, 98) but we all seem to be getting the same problem.

Over the last few months, I keep getting hangs while either downloading mail or mail containing web pages. All windows of NS that are open effectively hang either permanently, or for a long time (half an hour or more). On NT, I can't task switch, and attempts to kill the process are ignored/not handled. Try more than one kill attempt, and it hangs the task switcher.


Both NS, and the OS (including service packs) have been re-installed many times, and it keeps recurring.

Has anyone else got anything similar? Any ideas as to the cause? How about a diagnosis? I am reaching the end of my patience....

I've had Netscape 4.7 hang a lot on my systems, but never as badly as you say, never to the point where the process can't be killed on NT.

It'd have to be behaving quite badly in order to hang the task switcher on NT. There's very little I've ever seen that'll do that. Wow.

The hangs in Netscape are one reason I switched to using IE a while back. I know your problem isn't in the browser, it's in the mail component. And switching to a Microsoft solution means Outlook, and I avoid Outlook like it was the plague.

As Mail clients go, I prefer to use Forte's Agent. I'm using a pretty old version, too. It's rock-stable, pure Ascii with no scripting (so not chance for email viruses), and incredibly configurable.

I switched to IE for the same reasons (well... that and the instability of Netscape 6 and my own lack of patience for them to fix it). I never used NS 4.7 for any amount of time with Win2k to be able to see it hang like it did in Win98. In the past few months, I've been seeing the same hanging in IE, though. Not nearly as bad as I did in NS, but it's still there. I'm wondering if this might be a cache size issue or an issue with a HD being close to full. I know drives slow down considerably when they're getting full.

Looking through web logs from a few sites I have access to, it's a wonder, but people still do use NS. And even older 4.x versions. Uuuughhh. I stopped using Netscape back at version 2.something. When IE 3.0 came out I started using it full time - even though it had some quirks until 3.1. And I've never used it for email or news - that would be just torture.

Now IE just beats the pants off any NS version, including 6. NS have never had a clue about interface and the new techno-inspired graphics don't cut it. As far as stability goes, NS has always been a bad performer under every version of Windows and Mac OS I've tested. Unfriendly draw routines and other bad practises don't help.

As Mail clients go, I prefer to use Forte's Agent. I'm using a pretty old version, too. It's rock-stable, pure Ascii with no scripting (so not chance for email viruses), and incredibly configurable

I've been using Agent since summer 1995. At home for both news and email (though I've been without a news provider for a few months, I still use it for email). Version 1.9 is about to be released, and believe it or not, they're actually working on a 2.0 version (details yet to be announced). The only thing I've ever seen cause Agent to crap out are some other 3rd party programs that do bad things to winsock or a few that just plain conflict in a way I haven't identified (have always been little applets that get installed with other programs that I've easily disabled from the registry.)

If I had to pick a new email client it would probably be The Bat - however the only reason I didn't switch last year was because a new editor was promised - the defualt one wasn't anything like a standard text editor IMO and a pain for me.

There are no shortage of email clients to look at. Certainly enough to warrant immediately abandoning Netscape. You should be able to find mail converters to handle all your archived mail as well. Don't know if that was the type of suggestion you're looking for. But if it dies on different machines and OSes, it's probably not a good sign that the software is worth its price (in this case, nothing :)

Bruno

I prefer Pegasus Mail for email (but have been unfortunately forced to use some M$ rubbish at work . If you want to find out more about it the best place I've found is in the Netherlands. Of course there is always the "offical" web site too, but it actually seems to be out of date at the moment! It is no great problem importing NS email folders and address books. I mean I managed it