i downloaded version 4.77 of netscape yesterday. know thine enemy, and all that. i actually still use netscape 4 for reading newsgroups occasionally, because outlook express caches every newsgroup message you read, eating up disk space like a horde of locusts.

so i ran the newly installed program, opened the newsgroup window, and got a message that my “mail settings had not been configured.” clicked on the button to configure, and n4 launched Apple’s Internet control panel. it was at this point that i started to get a bad feeling, because the Internet CP came up with all entries set back to the default. so i was sitting there looking at it, when suddenly an alert box popped up saying “an external application has changed your settings.” sure enough, the form fields in the CP suddenly got filled out by a ghostly process somewhere.

i quit the CP and switched back to netscape 4.77. the news window worked fine. ok, i thought, some kind of momentary glitch.

imagine my surprise and consternation the next time i opened Internet Explorer, to find that all my settings had been returned to their defaults. autofill profile, homepage, display settings, download location, cookies … all gone.

as if i needed another reason to hate netscape 4.