Upgraded to Eudora 7 after a day

After discovering a lot of bugs with Eudora 6.2.5 (why are there more bugs with newer software?) I bit the bullet and installed Eudora 7.1.0.9 (the last-ever release) just before I went to bed. Fortunately, the bugs that I found have been overcome with version 7, which is at least something: now I am back nearly to the functionality I had with version 4.3.2. Hooray—version 7 gets me back to the functionality I had in 1999–2000!
   Of course, it no longer works in Paid mode (because the last time I paid was 1999) and really, if it were not for the SMTP authentication issues, I would have stuck with the old Eudora, which caused me far fewer problems. I do have a distracting Eudora box for Sponsored mode in the way, though there is a method for removing, or at least hiding, it.
   Because Eudora 6 refused to load after being closed down, I dare not shut down Eudora 7 at the moment, so that is one thing I have not tested yet. Newer software gives me the creeps.
   I think I am right to prefer the old stuff. First, the code was more compact and, therefore, better “proofread”. I notice that the installer for Eudora 7 was nearly double the size of Eudora 6. Yet the program functions exactly the same.
   Secondly, the programmers kept things simple, without bloating the software.
   Throughout my computing history, the old stuff has generally worked better. WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS worked fine. The Windows version was good, too, but then WordPerfect 6 came on the market. That was a piece of junk: I seem to recall it even had trouble switching to italics. It was also far more bloated than 5.1. WordPerfect 8, which I later bought, was fine for the most part, but it had trouble working out the distances between columns. Good old 5.1 never had these issues, though it was pretty bad at updating printer drivers. It is only with WordPerfect X4 (14) that some of the bugs have been ironed out—over a decade later. Maybe someone started caring again.
   Netscape was the same. Everything was fine up to 4.7, then 6 took ages to load and could no longer handle PostScript fonts. It also could not handle some basic things such as displaying quotation marks in the prescribed fonts. As of version 7.1, Netscape still could not handle these things. Even Mozilla took till version 3 before it rectified these typographic problems, though now it is easily (in terms of typography) the superior browser.
   Internet Explorer 5 was a good product, 6 was tolerable but bigger, 7 kept crashing. I never found out what 8 was like.
   There are programs which break these rules. Adobe seems to consistently deliver good stuff, real improvements on earlier versions. But it is one of the few exceptions that proves the rule.