RE: [Cooker] GET READY FOR A DISCUSSION Internet Utilities

[Klaus Erik Sebastian Vuorinen]

On Fri, 26 May 2000, B. K. Barley wrote:

> WEB BROWSERS AND PLUG-INS and other related software.
> The one thing that causes me to shift over to microtrash more often then not
> is reliable feature rich internet utilities.  Mail clients are the biggest
> problem that forces me to boot over to microtrash.  The clients that are
> promissing are still in early beta (some in alpha even) and are very buggy.

I have to second this. Since mail is one of the most often used applications
today, it is kind of weird that the clients are still a bit immature. Okay, Pine
works just fine ;-). But seriously this is an area that could see improvement.
Kmail and Balsa are there, but seem to be a bit slow in their advances. 

Search functions would be nice. At this time, you can not search
for specific messages in your mailfolder in Kmail. Kind of weird since the
filters function by searching for keywords and Kmail does have filters
(even if the filter function is not as smooth as one would like).

> Browsers:
> Sigh...this is a rough one for me.  I know that Netscape has been actively
> courting the Linux community and has been working on a browser for the
> platform for several years now.  The problem is, it's buggy and doesn't like
> some things like volcanoe chat (which is something I use regularly.) 

Browsers are important, since everybody uses them :-) 
But there is light at the end of the tunnel... Mozilla is slowly turning into
something usable (still crashes a lot but the functionality is mostly there).
Then we have KDE 2.0 coming next fall (presumably), with it's new and
improwed Konqueror. And there are a few others as well... 


So basically this all could be covered simply by saying that strong and
functional Internet apps with all the functions that one can think of would
be nice.

Most of the needed tools are already in development, but would probably
benefit from a bit of help along the way...  What's the deal with ~15
mail-clients for Gnome ? I could understand 5 clients or so, but 15 is
a bit much. :-)

Sebastian Vuorinen