I’m posting todays news from Mozilla 0.7. This version is another incremental improvement over v0.6. This version finally includes SSL support and it seems to work. On Windows NT, it crashes maybe once per hour or so. On my Red Hat 6.1/Intel box it has crashed a couple of times. On my newer Red Hat 7.0 box (my main workstation), it has been running for several days under heavy usage with no crashes. I haven’t found any sites that break it yet. It still sucks up a lot of memory but seems a bit faster than v0.6.

While I suspect I haven’t seen the last of my Verizon DSL billing problem, I am one step closer to getting decent Net access at home. This is a Good Thing. I seem to be the last person left on Earth who has to access The Net through a dial-up modem. I described my Verizon DSL horror story previously. I’ve also tried contacting ATT about their wireless broadband service. It sounds cool – high speed Net access plus local and long distance phone service. The downside is that it doesn’t use Ethernet to connect to the computer like DSL or Cable Modems. It has some sort of special hardware that requires a USB connection and they only provide drivers for Windows 95/98. We have a Linux/Intel box and a Windows NT4 box at home and I’m not inclined to downgrade either of them. I called a few other wireless boradband service providers such as Broadbandnow but they don’t provide service in my area (or provide it only to business or apartment complexes). I’ve also called our local cable company several times over the last year or so and they always say they’re going to offer cable modem Net access but it’s always a few months away.

Well, I called the cable company yesterday and they said they were scheduled to start providing Internet service as of next week. They took down some info from me and I’m on the list to get it installed. I don’t know how fast it will be or what kind of hardware they offer or if I’ll get static or dynamic IPs. And I’d prefer DSL but anything beats dial-up. I just hope the installers don’t make any trouble for me because of my Linux box.