Back in the days before Microsoft (legally or illegally) took over the bulk of the browser market, everybody used Netscape Navigator to wander the Web. But we all soon learned that its technology was not cutting-edge in every respect. For example, every time you installed a new version of Netscape, you were warned that you must first manually uninstall any older version(s). The consequences of ignoring this mandate were often dire.
I always thought that was sloppy programming. Lots of other programs were smart enough to determine that you had an older version installed, and to prompt you as to whether you wanted to keep it (e.g. for testing purposes) or trash it. Not rocket science.
More recently, I’ve been reminded of this old syndrome with various Longhorn systems running Java. More than once I’ve updated Java, only to later discover that older versions are sitting out there taking up space. There are many very smart people at Sun. Why can’t they come up with a way to update Java that gives the installer the ability to choose to keep or toss the old version? One system I saw last week had four separate versions of Java on it. Shades of Netscape!
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