OFF: HowToMakeLove, not (Browser) War(s)

[Stephan Forstner]

I'm not taking sides here, just making some comments...

As a developer, you can't necessarily tell people to upgrade - especially
with large corporations and governement agencies, there are often rules that
specify what may be on the computers at a given site. We run into this
problem all the time in our work - to get something up and running, you can
often take shortcuts and make assumptions as to available software/hardware,
but once it IS running, you have to go back and make sure that things will
work everywhere, not just for the specific configuration you've initially
developed/tested on.

In our shop we have everything from DOS 3.3 to Windows XP in the M$ world,
IE AND Netscape, etc. I personally still use Win95 OSR2 and IE 4.0, not for
any special reason, just because it's there and I haven't had any compelling
reason to upgrade. The official Hawkwind site crashes my copy of IE 4.0 when
I access the lyrics pages - but it isn't necessarily IE that is the problem
- IE 4.0 running on NT 4.00 does not crash. It's not necessarily the OS
either - the NT machine has a lot more RAM, it might be a memory problem. In
any case, there is something not 100% about the code - no offense to Rik Rx
- as a programmer (though not JavaScript) I can appreciate the work he has
put into the site - and the questionable behavior some of us are seeing
isn't all that consistent or easy to track down, at least not on my machine.
My own experience with these kinds of problems would lead me to first check
my memory usage - buffer overruns, illegal allocations/deallocations,
assigning illegal values to variables, assuming memory is available when it
might not be, that kind of thing - but again, I have no JavaScript
experience so I'll leave it to Rik to work on this.

Also, it is not very helpful for people to just say, 'Well, the site crashes
my browser, it sucks'. For the developer to address the issue, s/he needs to
know something about what was happening when the crash occurred. We have a
wide spectrum of OSs and browsers in use on this list, if everyone who
experienced problems would try to note down where the problem occurred and
what they were doing at the time, and then forwarded the info to Rik,
eventually he would figure out was going on, he could fix his code, and it
would become more stable (and portable).

If Rik wishes, I can try to pinpoint the exact behavior causing the crash on
my system(s) - but the impending re-design may obviate the need to find out
where the problem was anyway. Once the new design is up and running, I would
recommend that any problems we encounter be logged and forwarded to Rik -
provided he agrees of course - and that way everyone should eventually be
able to access the site w/o problems. Just my opinion.

Stephan