Download feature suggestion

[William Shipley]

> I would  
> really like to see OmniWeb implement multi-threading so that multiple  
> downloads may be accomplished simultaneously as may be done in Netsurfer,  
> Netscape, or a variety of other WWW browsers.  With the framework provided by  
> NEXTSTEP, this shouldn't be a terribly large amount of work and will improve  
> the user interface quite a bit in my opinion.

Within the framework of NEXTSTEP it wouldn't be such a hard problem, but unfortunately the socket layer of UNIX isn't thread safe, and besides which the library we based OmniWeb on is CERN 2.15, which isn't written in Objective-C and is very hard to modify.

We've now added so many features and fixed so many bugs it'd be very hard to go to CERN 3.0, which is multi-threaded.

Our competitors apparently developed their own web kits from scratch, which isn't an impossible job but does take time.  Basically, in the short term, the only benifit we'd get from this is the multi-threading thing, since we've hacked the CERN library to do a lot of the other stuff we want.

I'm not saying we aren't working on multi-threading, but I am saying when we do it it's going to take resources off other areas of development, and so we have to weigh whether we'd like to add X UI feature or go back and rewrite the library and break a bunch of stuff so we can get multi-threading.

-Wil
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