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Gecko May Replace IE In AOL/CompuServe
ShaunC writes: "According to this C|Net article, pieces of Gecko have been spotted in a beta version of the next CompuServe client, and AOL has confirmed that Gecko is being tested as CompuServe's default browser. AOL 7.0 is shipping with IE, but perhaps future versions will widen the gap between AOL and Microsoft. (I'm glad we won't be seeing AOL-TW-MS-NBC.)"
Gecko renders very well but it still has javascript and IE compatibility issues.
Users will yell if something that worked with IE don't work any more.
However, there will be a lot of bug reports, and those will make Mozilla better.
{{.sig}}
If CompuServe 7 comes packaged with Gecko, it could be one step toward rekindling the Web browser wars from the late '90s. Once the hands-down leader of browser technology, Netscape Communications, now a division of AOL, has let its browser slip into the middle of the pack.
Yes, but this time, the browser wars will be a fight to provide customers with the highest level of web standards compliance, rendering speed, cross-platform capability, and truly useful features. I, for one, think that this sounds like a good thing. (Even though I will probably not be using anything but Konqueror ever again.)
MozillaZine.org has a pointer to a news.com piece too plus additional comments.
>>Leaps ahead of any other browser that's available at the moment
In what respect? I use Mozilla exclusively on Windows and Galeon on Linux and I see no advantage that IE6 has over Mozilla.
Maybe this will finally convince my banks that Mozilla is a real web browser. It's annoying having to switch back to Netscape 4.x to use online banking just because they haven't bothered to test and adjust for Mozilla. And yes, I know what it takes to make a major web site Mozilla compliant. (I was formerly employed by a large rodent. ;-) ).
- Stealth Dave
Evil is as eval("does");
If you take this artcle about microsoft wanting to deliver "AOL like services", this seems to be a logical step for AOL.
;-)
This could get very interesting, I don't think this is a browser war, I think it's an ISP war...
Would YOU distribute software of your newly aquired #1 competitor??
Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity
How do you figure that? I'm using Opera exclusively, and I harldy ever find sites that look messed up (once a month or so).
On top of that, it's lighter, has mouse gestures and a much better interface (once you get used to it). I'd say, try it.
"leaps ahead of any other browser". What does that actually mean? That people have keep buggering about with HTML (yes, I know there's more to it than HTML) so new versions of browsers are constantly needed in order to keep up. What effect does that have? Well, with an MS browser, upgrading generally means replacing half your OS with files (OLE*.DLL amongst others) that cause old apps to not work - even if they had any disk space left. And why is it changing? Generally to please a load of graphic designers (make the bastards work with a 14.4 modem) plus the people who market stuff like Dreamweaver and C*ntpage. Do you think it's rewarding work for web developers to have to code and test for all these different browsers?
/. looks the same to me.
What do you actually need in a browser aside from fast HTML rendering (with CSS), a consistent Javascript model (so you can do stuff without having to go back to the server) and an architecture which supports common plugins (Flash, SVG). OK, you can make an argument for Java Applets if something more complicated needs to be done on the machine, but downloading and running some other muppets native executable code (ActiveX) and running it with my priveledges - no way. I can do enough damage with my own code. If it's complicated, why isn't it running on the server? What ever happened to thin clients?
Stop the madness.
PS I appreciate the irony that I'm posting using IE 6, but I'm at work and I'm testing whether it offers anything over our standard IE 5.01. It doesn't -
This sig made only from recycled ASCII
I use mozilla. It rocks. It has tabs, it has mouse gestures, it's fast and it's really stable. I can theme it any way I want. I of course have IE installed but I never fire it up unless I visit one or two percent of the sites that insist on it.
Besides Mozilla does not leak my personal information, it does not have cryptic option names designed to fool me, it does not keep sending me to MSN, it does not accept activeX controls, it does not execute viruses automatically, and best of all it allows me to turn off popups on page load.
Mozilla is the best browser on the market and it's not even version one yet. This is because it focuses on me. It wants to help me have a better web browsing experience. IE wants to deliver me to advertisers. That's a significant difference.
The number one reason AOL should go with mozilla (or gecko) is because MS is planning to implement smart tags and has already implemented 404 redirects. The last thing AOL wants is for their customers to be redirected to MS sites anytime they click on anything and besides why give aid and comfort to your enemy.
By switching to mozilla AOL will also discourage people from building IE only sites and that will be a good thing for all of us.
War is necrophilia.
If Gecko is replacing IE all we need now is something to replace AOL & Compuserve
If you've kept track of the history of Netscape, especially the history of AOL since buying NS, you'll quickley figure out that AOL has been using NS to have it's way with Microsoft. Whenever there is a dispute over AOL icon desktop placment with Windows, or whatnot, AOL quietly leaks that it is considering NS6 / Mozilla for it's next release.
.95, which I am happy to report is the first version of Mozilla that I feel is 100% usable and I'm actually *happy* to use. (I run an old AMD K6/2 and previous versions ran too slow for my tastes, as did IE I just switched to Mozlla from NS4 early this week.) That said, I *hope* that AOL does decide to use Gecko for AOL and / or Compuserve, but I'm not holding my breath. After all, it may be more strategicly advantageous for them to continue using IE's engine.
I do support Mozilla, in fact I am writing this on Mozilla
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.
Hmm... IE6 doesn't seem to be as stable as IE 5.5. I have had things like font rendering problems and 'hangs' in the system. They have imbedded things like a media player directly into the browser and whenever that or MSN Messenger have problems, it's effecting the browser for some reason.
I am sure that they will work it out.. but IE6 is definately not their highest quality browser released IMHO (5.0 had problems until they fixed it up shortly after release)
Christopher
Mozilla
I knew that Mozilla was a fantastic project, and I always understood how it might have huge value for whomever wanted to adopt it. The one thing that I didn't see was how AOL was going to make money off of it. Seeing as how they're the ones bankrolling the developement right now.This seems to make it all clear. They wanted Mozilla available as an alternative to IE if they ever needed to part ways with MS.
Interesting.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
I'm not sure which issue you're talking about here, so I'll address both :)
If IE gets a page with an error code that's below a certain size, it substitutes it's own page. Instructions on how to disable it with a registry setting here (or it may be a preference these days..)
There's definitely a preference for this. Uncheck something along the lines of "Search from the address bar" in the advanced settings.
Here in Spain AOL has just launched a service called AOL avant.
It is a iMac type box which you can have for about 20 dollars a month with internet connection. It uses Linux with Mozilla as the web browser. It's made so your grandma can use it.
They are looking for an inital roll-out of 500,000 units, moving up to about a million. They are doing this in conjunction with a national bank.
So, AOL is already using Gecko/Mozilla, maybe just not in the USA.
Personally I believe that this is a trial of a service that they wish to rollout in many other countries. I think they choose Spain to try not to generate too attention on it. It wouldn't suprise me if they had plans to roll this out in many other European countries, and perhaps Latin America.
More here
Like Speed? IE6 is damn fast and stable, Mozilla is getting pretty close, the nightly builds over the last couple of months have been fixing alot of bugs. m$ mice bugs seem to be gone from the nightly builds too.
Side note - I hate mozilla's security method of its random directory names. Anyone know how to turn that crap off? I want to use 1 profile in 1 directory, like netscape, ie, opera, links....
On the Mac (a more level ground for comparison) I've always found Netscape just as stable as IE. On Linux, just as unstable as any other browser.
Hmmm... I thought your "previous statement" was that we shouldn't try to fix it at all?(Which anyway is a lost cause, from what I hear. IE = "All your prefs are belong to us!")
Timeo idiotikOS et dona ferentes
I guess a beowulf cluster of these wouldn't be very useful
of phrases such as "AOL has confirmed that Gecko is being tested as CompuServe's default browser."
Woah, merja-vu.
every so often i have to launch AOL to see how (if) my work is functioning correctly under AOL's hackward-ass implementation of IE. (and to check out the britney chat rooms for hot hot chicks, just kidding, put the gasoline away) Whenever i do i love the way it lumbers into consciousness, shakes off the dust of sleep and ponderously begins to connect to the server...
yeah i would love to see AOL move to a smaller, lithe, tightly coded browser that would spring up and start 'a parsing... then again i would prefer if AOL would just throw it in and hook into whatever the user's default browser was, or allow the user (assuming he/she was a complete AOL ISP slave) to d/l one of their own.... then again i really wish AOL would go the way of delphi and berma-shave....also: me being taller and more handsome...
As I understood it, AOL used to have about 40% of the consumer market, and as a result a large number of the browsers otu their were I.E, albeit wrapped inside AOL. with mozilla embedded within AOL, the number of eventual mozilla users goes up by several million. Ace! I've been following mozilla since they released the source code all those years ago, this is one of the few rays of light with regards to any kind of widespread adoption of mozilla.
anyone know of an open source VB-Script engine? part o the problem with using mozill ain corporate intranet stuff is that lots of developers tend to end up using VB-Script because it's easy - with an opensource VB-Script we could implement XPCom bindings as well as page level DOM stuff in VB-Script.
ps.slashdot: what the hell is this invalid formkeys error? I get it when it try to post in mozilla - a slashdot/M$ conspiracy if ever I saw one..
Poor CSS support
This is simply not true. It supports all of CSS1 according to the specifications, and a lot of CSS2.
Check out this chart to compare the CSS implementation of different browsers and browser versions.
Saying they contribute nothing is a bit unfair.
Also, AOL has actually released a few other Open Source applications. Take a look at AOLserver for instance.
AOL isn't my favorite company, but they aren't all bad all the time :)
There is discussion about the box on Barriopunto (Spain's version of Slashdot) here.
Comments on it vary. Some people say it's OK for Joe Public. Others say it sucks and hangs up. One says that the Mozilla and Linux distribution is very heavily modified and it is difficult to tell which versions they are using.
Someone points out that the box is basically the Intel Dot.Station Web Appliance. The spec. for the box is here.
The spec. says:
* Custom Intel browser based on Mozilla-- the world's most standards-compliant browser technology.
And later:
* Custom Linux operating system for increased flexibility and innovation.
More information about AOL avant from Intel's web site here.
I find it somewhat disturbing as in this case, AOL are profiting directly from the product, meanwhile, they contribute nothing back to the open source community (except bug reports, but what AOL users submit those).
Uhh, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't AOL funding a significant chunk of Mozilla development? Don't they have programmers on staff working on this stuff?
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
1. KHTML is not cross-platform, and thus less useful for AOL.
2. KHTML is based on Qt, which requires commercial licensing on Windows
3. Gecko is a better and faster renderer.
4. AOL/Netscape is more familiar with Gecko, since it is their product.
I find it somewhat disturbing as in this case, AOL are profiting directly from the product, meanwhile, they contribute nothing back to the open source community (except bug reports, but what AOL users submit those).
Ummm, AOL employs the majority of the Mozilla developers. Whatever you want to say about AOL, one cannot justly say they don't contribute to the OSS community.
If you don't believe me, go to www.mozilla.org and browse until you find lists of module owners and contributors. Or search bugzilla. Note that something like three quarters of the e-mail addresses end in @netscape.com.
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
this is one of the few rays of light with regards to any kind of widespread adoption of mozilla.
Bullsh*t.
Mozilla is being used in the Intel Dot.station, Nokia Media Terminal, Instant AOL Touchpad, Printer assistant from HP, IBM web browser for OS2, Redhat, Debian and a bunch of other Linux distributions, and a lot of other places besides. Not bad for an application that hasn't even got to 1.0 yet. And we can expect to see adoption of it really pick up speed since it has become really stable over the last couple of months.
>You type somthing wrong and it actually goes to an MSN search page
I'v been cold called several times by telemarketers offering to see me links to my website when someone types somthing into the IE6 address bar that isn't a valid domain name. They want the equivalent of aprox USD150 setup fee and USD150 per phrase. I consider this to be another example of abuse of thier monopoly. They are attempting to use their control of most peoples browser to gain an unfair advantage over existing search engines and to some extent bypass the domain name system itself.
I find this strange. I build web sites for a living, so I have to use IE a lot even though I'm not too fond of it. And until this week, NS 4.76 was my browser of choice (I downloaded Mozilla .95 Monday and haven't looked back. I downloaded every milestone build since .2 and this is the first one I thought was more usable than what I was using.)
.95 (even though I think HTML rendering is a hair slower) the window rendering speed is now acceptable. I'd say faster than IE 5.x / 6.x but still a bit slower than NS 4.x. But that's okay. It's worlds ahead of NS4 in terms of stability and it's just a wonderful browser to use... especially for a developer.
That said, I think it's clear that I use these browsers more than just once a week or so. All of them get heavy use from me so I can g et a lot of comparison time. My machine is a K6/2 450 running Win ME (I do lots of multimedia editing, hence ME is better for me than 98se)
Here's what I've found from my observations:
IE: SLOW AS MOLASAS (SP?). NS4 kicks it's ass hands down.IE is slow to render windows, slow to render HTML when a window has been rendered, and (most anoyingly) is slow to respond to UI. I have a habit when I am searching for something with google to do the following: Search google, open page in new window, hit ctrl+f and start typing what it was I was looking for so I can find WHERE the relavant thing is on the page. I consistantly type faster than IE can keep up. Ler's say I'm looking for "widget". I hit ctrl+f and then type w-i-d-g-e-t [ENTER]. I look up... only to see the "et" in the word "let" highlighted. The search window appears so slow that if I don't remember to wait for it (only about a second, but still...) then the leading characters get truncated. Consistantly.
NS4: Not bad... until I got a broadband connection. NS4 consistantly blew away, IE, NS6 and Mozilla. (Except in HTML rendering speed for Mozilla). It's biggest advantage was the fact that it's windows would render instantly on even the slowest system. The only problem was that once I got broadband and it started downloading larg web pages FAST, it would freeze... pause really before rendering the HTML. Some pages rendered faster when I was on 56K. I think NS4 just has a problem with parsing large HTML files rapidly. If it gets them spoon fed, it renders them as fast as it can, but if it gets a page of HTML dumped on it, it gags and chokes and generaly has a hard time. That's when I started using IE a little more than I had to...
Mozilla: The first thing I noticed when I first downloaded Mozilla (ditto for NS6) was WOW, these Windows render slow as hell! I could draw the windows with an etch-a-sketch faster than this! Then the next thing I noticed, blew me away. HTML rendering was blisteringly fast. I had read about how one of the goals of the Mozilla project was to create a wonderfuly standards compliant browser, so I ran some informal tests against old and new pages I had saved localy on my machine. Some were standards compliant and others were "real world" compliant. Amazing... the standards complient pages rendered just as they should! They were pages which I hade taken down from my sites (and replaced with non standards complient ones) because either NS4 or IE didn't render them correctly. Mozilla rendered both NS4 and IE's buggy pages right. It even rendered the nonstandard pages the way I wanted them to look! IT took me a bit of digging to figure out why... Mozilla includes a "buggy" mode that treats pages without a DTD declaration as non standards complient. That way IE's known bugs that were designed around, show up fine! Wonderful! Since then, I've downloaded every Mozilla milestone and now, at
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.
If we just had it under Linux it would definitely dominate everything.
That's just it. If you want to surf the web then you must use Windows. Let's face it folks, Al Gore didn't invent the Internet. Microsoft INNOVATED it. Bleh.
Don't bitch about everyone not being good little boys and failing to use IE. Insist on DOCUMENTED standards compliance. Documented does not mean: use the following COM system call to..........
Show me a fully crossplatform and open IE and I'll allow that you have a point. There is isn't one? Oh.
CompuServe? That still *exists*?? No need to respond, it obviously must...but I assumed it had died its well earned death long ago.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Well, pack me off to Bugtussle, Beulah, seems this swamp ain't as nice as it looked.
Big hint, here, guys: standardizing on defacto standards owned by a company that demonstrates allegience to no one but itself (check out the recent enterprise licensing schemes if you think MS cares about its customers one whit) is a reliable way to get screwed.
That's especially true when you consider that, in this case, "standardizing" means making a conscious decision to exclude a portion of the browsing public. Can't be the fairest thing to do when you work for paying customers who need the biggest bang for their buck.
Big cheers to AOL if they go ahead with this. I'm damned sure that most big sites will not tolerate web developers who lock out that much of their audience. I neither like nor use the AOL service, but I promise to say nice things about it if this happens.
pieces of Gecko have been spotted in a beta version of the next CompuServe client
Actually they've spotted pieces of Geico, which can save CompuServe customers 15% or more on car insurance.
I'm not a journalist, but I play one on slashdot
I'm using Galeon to write this. I don't recall ever using Mozilla for anything important, but Galeon rocks -- even my nontechnical girlfriend likes it. It's fast, simple, and aside from the Galeon team's apparent decision to make Backspace not go back one page in 0.94/0.12.whatever, it's very similar to IE. Which, of course, is pretty much the benchmark these days.
Bottom line, I don't hate my Linux web browser anymore, and Gecko/Galeon is the reason why. If AOL can use Gecko to, say, spit out shitloads of cheap Linux X terminals for clients, so much the better.
And if they're only using it to strongarm MS, that's okay too.
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
And the beast shall be made legion. Its numbers shall be increased a thousand thousand fold. The din of a million keyboards like unto a great storm shall cover the earth, and the followers of Mammon shall tremble.
from The Book of Mozilla, 3:31
(Red Letter Edition)
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
I've said it before during other AOL browser discussions..
I'd like to see AOL make their own Linux-based kiosk-like distro. Now that Ximian Red Carpet is maturing, adding an AOL channel would be pretty darn easy.
I would absolutely rebuild my Mom's old PC as an AOL kiosk for her. I know a real estate agent who uses Compuserve does all his MLS work on the web, and calls me whenever he gets the virus du jour. Definitely needs an AOL kiosk.
Intelligent Life on Earth
Opera doesn't even support the DOM as well as Konqueror --- let alone Mozilla or IE.
(Hint: Support for the DOM read-only methods is EASY. Support for the read-write methods is HARD.)
No doubt it would be quite risky for AOL to replace IE with Gecko. They might lose customers.
But if they go through with it, they'd certainly force lots of Web sites to become more standards-compliant. So other makers of standards-compliant browsers would benefit hugely, with no risk to themselves. This would be a very good thing.
Personally I suspect AOL is just testing the waters, and won't go with Gecko until it is very much better than IE.
And it's subjective which is easier since a lot of people would be more comfortable with the C/C++/Java like syntax in JS.
Either way it all boils down to this - Javascript (or I should say ECMAScript) is a industry standard, universally recognized as the scripting language for client-side web work, whereas VBScript is a proprietary language that only runs in a single browser. Unless you're developing for that one browser, I see no reason for using VBScript.
I will not use Opera until it supports Unicode. I need to read Chinese and Japanese web sites and without Unicode support, my English based OS is not able to process these web sites properly. Netscape support in this area is half baked and IE is the best so far. Opera seems promising, but still not there (localization of the UI doesn't count)
¦ ©® ±
It is not at all a Gecko fan-club, but the whole message was laughable.
The notion was so incredibly rediculuous, that it could only be described as a troll.
I have nothing against KHTML, in fact I think it is a fine product.
But why on EARTH would you ditch something that is more mature, more sophisticated, already cross-platform (not only wrappers, or ports to small OSes), and something you are totally familiar with.
The KDE-trolling has to stop, the KDE-developers don't do this, they just program and create a splendid product, but some of the users are doing KDE a disfavor by trolling.
If i recall correctly:
:P)
b8 = load AX
00 4c with 004c
cd 21 = int 21
4c on 21 was exit program, right ? (its been a long time ago
Yeah, the nerve. Imagine sitting down to use a piece of software and actually expecting it to work. Perfectly, no less! And if it doesn't, I have the unmitigated gall, the chutzpah, the social insensitivity to attempt to make it work. I am truly ashamed of myself.
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
IE can't render CSS for shit. What are you smoking? And unless they've fixed it recently, their javascript implementation is not compliant either (for example, they used to ditch the case-sensitivity of variables)
I generally use Mozilla, IE is pretty buggy (stable, but buggy, e.g. sometimes the drop-down menus just don't work unless you alt+tab and alt+tab back again, or clicking 'back' results in form data being lost, or when you click "refresh" and it totally ignores your request to refresh etc), but there is one reason I often go back to IE: the "save as" feature that will save the page along with all inlined images etc, converting the addresses to local addresses. If Mozilla had that, I would probably ditch IE totally. It would probably be fairly easy to add too, I've even considered getting the source code and having a go at adding it myself.
Mozilla is the best browser on the market and it's not even version one yet
Personally, I think they should just call it "Mozilla 5" or "Mozilla 6" when they hit "version 1" status. Purely for "marketing" reasons -> Mozilla 1.0 will be approximately equivalent to at least IE 5. But naming it "version 1" when IE is at "version 6" will look bad in the eyes of the sheeple.
You have to code "it all TWICE"?? Holy shit, dude, you ever heard of "standards"? Geez .. I got my web site looking virtually the same on both IE and Mozilla *just by following standards*, almost no extra effort (except to work around some IE CSS bugs).
/. "invalid form key" errors, this is pissing me off now.
And forcing everyone to "go Microsoft" is NOT making things cheaper, in case you hadn't noticed, Windows is fscking expensive, and its *getting more expensive* lately.
Fsck
KHTML is way less stable than Mozilla, even though Mozilla isn't to 1.0 yet
Bullsh**t. KHTML is very stable. If you are not happy with some third-party JavaScript-based web sites, turn off JavaScript support. As I wrote in another posting, do not mix JS with DHTML. These are different things. Konqueror has the best CSS2 support on the market, so far. Click on link above or here to see how W3C CSS page renders in Konq. Compare than it to MS IE6 or other browsers.
All that and I didn't even get into the speed advantage...
Are you kidding? Konqueror starts in 3 sec. on my computer, while Mozilla needs 20-25 seconds to start!
Besides, Konq opens new window in less than 1 sec., while Mozilla needs 3 sec.(!) to open new window. Minimize/Maximize actions are also pretty slow for Mozilla.
KDE. KDE Themes. KDE News. Visit http://kde2.newmail.ru
I have nothing against KHTML, in fact I think it is a fine product. But why on EARTH would you ditch something that is more mature, more sophisticated, already cross-platform..
Com'on, nobody was ditching Mozilla. But, in fact, it would be funny to see AOL and CompuServe going to KHTML instead of Mozilla/Gecko.
Anyway, I can't agree with you that Mozilla is "more mature, more sophisticated" than KHTML. Mozilla is 3.5 years old, KHTML in fact about 1 year old. I am very much impressed that KDE developers could do in 1 year, and Mozilla - in 3.5 years. But note that development speed for KHTML is 3 times faster than Mozilla's one
(not only wrappers, or ports to small OSes), and something you are totally familiar with.
Have you ever heard of Konqueror/Embedded?
It's already in many embedded devices, including PDAs and Internet Kiosks. So, Konq is pretty much portable. Do I need to remind you about Konq/Embedded ports to BeOS and AtheOS?
KDE. KDE Themes. KDE News. Visit http://kde2.newmail.ru