8a393
I've had the opportunity to borrow a Powerbook 12 running 393 as primary os for a week... I've had it since Sunday, and I think its nearly ready. There are three major problems I've encountered:
First, Spotlight initial indexing is way to slow. Tiger was freshly installed on this machine late Saturday, and it's still doing indexing. Currently, it says 22 hours left, but it said 4 hours left on Sunday.
Second, Safari tends to crash on me. It just closes, i get the bug report window, and i restart Safari. Happens once an hour or so.
Third, it breaks WMP9. Could be a M$ issue, but it doesn't work on this build of Tiger.
Other than that, the system is pretty good. Dashboard is much better than Konfabulator, as long as you don't want any widgets appearing anywhere but the Dashboard/Konspose. Automator is good, but I havn't seen much use for it. Tiger mail is really nice... the new UI has grown on me.
Anyway, March 31 sounds reasonable for a release... I think they can work out the Spotlight/Safari issues in the 3 or 4 weeks between the 393 release and when it would have to be done for a release (albeit with limited boxed product available) on 3/31. Every other release of OS X had some majoy problems on their GM release... This would be no exception. But it could very well be to the quality of past releases very soon.
