MAJOR BUG FOUND IN NETSCAPE NAVIGATORSAN ANDREESSEN, CA /DenounceNewswire/ -- 12 June 1997 -- Netscape Communications Corporation said on Thursday it is investigating a potential bug found in current and all past versions of its popular internet browser. All versions of the Netscape Navigator, from 1.0 to the current 4.0, said a Netscape spokesdroid, are supposed to have had a bug-reporting feature that let users report bugs as they encountered them. Users were supposed to be able to even configure their browser so reports of the bugs, right as they occurred, could be automatically sent to Netscape's quality assurance teams to examine and fix. However, it was learned Thursday that since 1994, the bug reporting feature has never worked, because of, Netscape now admits, a bug. "The programmer who created the bug left Netscape two-and-a-half years ago," the spokesdroid added. "He was recruited away by Microsoft and is now a VP there." Thus, Netscape never knew, over the past 3 years, if users of its products ever encountered bugs unless they undertook the painstakingly Herculean task of writing down obscure hexadecimal mumbo-jumbo memory locations and error codes, then, assuming their machine was still functioning, calling up an email program, typing in a lengthy and descriptive message including what steps were taken to cause the bug to happen, sending the message to Netscape (assuming their Internet connection was functioning), and then wait for Netscape's automatic email reply subsystem to spit back a message (a) acknowledging receipt of the email and (b), if observant users looked closely, telling the users, in gray letters printed on a gray background, that it's pointless to report bugs to Netscape because nobody will ever fix them anyway because a new version will be coming out sooner than the bug could be fixed so why bother. In its boldest move yet, Netscape announced it will send a T-Shirt and a $1000 prize to each user who experienced a bug, wanted to report it, but didn't have time. Given the vast numbers of Netscape Navigator users, Netscape estimates a one-time charge to the company of $9.9 billion, to be amortized over the next 100 years. Netscape stock plummetted so far down today that the entire NASDAQ trading system had to be halted for 4 hours as heavy-duty cranes were brought in to lift the collapsed trading floor.
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