Here’s what we refer to as reaping what you sow. For some reason, the geniuses at AOL decided they’d been too long without a real browser release, so they took a half baked milestone version of Mozilla and called it Netscape 6.0. They’ve since made their way all the way to Netscape 6.2, but all of these releases were still based on pre-release versions of Mozilla. Unfortunately, because of the time required to AOLify the Netscape releases, they’ve also always run behind the Mozilla releases in terms of bug fixes, stability, and new features, so there has never been any reason for anyone to install Netscape 6.
At this point, we’re nearing the release of Mozilla, and Netscape has created a release based on the 1.0 release candidates. Because they dawdled around with the pre-releases for so long, AOL has decided to refer to the new release as Netscape 7.0. I hope that people don’t feel so bitter about the awful 6.0 line of releases (none of which were ready for prime time) that they ignore Netscape 7.0, which really ought to be quite good as long as AOL doesn’t screw up Mozilla’s good work too badly.
The rhetoric between India and Pakistan is becoming increasingly heated, and America seems to be as close as possible to turning a blind eye toward the impending conflict. An all out war between India and Pakistan is likely to feature the use of nuclear weapons and millions of civilian casualties, and it doesn’t seem like enough is being done to avert it on the diplomatic front. The Brits are sending Foreign Secretary Jack Straw to the region next week, and the US is going to send a senior envoy from the State Department, but that seems at most like a good start.