Hi all,

I decided to migrate from Netscape 4.77 (Linux, Debian) to
Netscape 6.2.1. I downloaded the binary from netscape.com
since I didn't find any debian packages.

I decided to upgrade mostly for improved CSS support.

The only big problems I've had so far involved mail.

Warning: I did lose mail at one point by trying to
move one subfolder into another. I may have lost mail
because I hadn't yet made the transition to 6.2 mail
folder style (see #2 below). I don't want to test
this again.

1) I use fetchmail over ssh to get my mail from a w3c machine.
    Netscape 6.2.1 has movemail support built in (to move from
    my inbox on my local machine to Netscape's inbox), but not
    exposed through the UI. You have to edit the prefs.js file
    by hand. Details on the mozilla site [1].

2) I expected to be able to point 6.2 at my 4.77 nested mail
    subdirectories, but it doesn't work out of the box. You
    have to do the following (which I didn't find on the
    Web, but I was at Netscape last week. :)

      For each directory D:
           a) mv D D.sbd
           b) touch D

    You'll see the directory "D" (not D.sbd) in the mail
    folder viewer.

    If you don't do this, you won't be able to see nested
    mail folders.

3) I got rid of "Local Folders". I found a FAQ that said
    I shouldn't [2].

4) The keyboard commands have changed from 4.77, which is kind
    of disconcerting. For instance, some of the emacs-like
bindings of the editor are gone, so that ctrl-P opens the printer
dialog box, rather than take me to the previous line. See
discussions about this at mozilla [3]. Anyone know how to use
emacs as the mozilla mail editor? I have lost too many mails
by hitting the wrong keys in NN 4.x and accidentally selecting
all text and deleting it, with no undo. This may be fixed
in 6.2 (I just did a test, and happily, I can select text,
delete, and undo the delete.)

5) You can configure the default search tool to be google.
However, I find that when I quit Netscape and restart, the
setting reverts to netscape as the search tool.

6) I think that 6.2.1 is a little slower than 4.77 (e.g.,
when building summaries for 10k messages in one of my
folders, 6.2 was noticeably slower than 4.77), but on
the whole, it looks like 6.2 will be an improvement.

 - Ian

[1] http://www.mozilla.org/mailnews/movemail/
[2] http://www.hmetzger.de/net6e.html#localfolders
[3] http://www.mozilla.org/projects/ui/accessibility/mozkeyintro.html
--
Ian Jacobs ([email protected])   http://www.w3.org/People/Jacobs
Tel:                     +1 718 260-9447