Slashdot Mirror
AOL Beta Testing Gecko-Based Browser
Bedouin X writes: "MozillaZine is reporting that AOL has released a Gecko client for Windows! Scuttlebutt says that it's based on Gecko .94.2. While I think that the common assumption that AOL including Gecko equals 34 million new OSS users is fallacious (most AOL hits on my site are 5.0), there is no denying that it would be a major - though seemingly inevitible - win and great for a more standard web. Maybe Capital One would quit being the lone holdout of my creditors that don't support Mozilla." Reader SEE also adds a link to a story on CNET.
When I saw last week that AOL was moving to Mozilla last week, that was the best news I'd seen in a while. It *almost* made up for Dubya's nuclear policy mess or Holling's tramplings. (But not quite, unfortunately, and definitely couldn't make up for both, in any case.)
Still, I don't see how you perceive an open and standard web as 'inevitable'. Prior to the AOL move, I would have considered a Microsoft proprietary web considerably more 'inevitable' than open standards.
Most of the public doesn't even truly understand what open standards are or mean, much less feel them important. But these are the same people who take it for granted that the half-inch coarse-thread nut fits on the half-inch coarse-thread bolt, no matter who made each part.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Take that, mozilla bashers.
Was there any reason not to think that a standards-compliant, easily embeddable, open-source HTML renderer wouldn't eventually become a great choice for network software? It doesn't depend on users taking it on themselves to go get and use mozilla (which I agree wasn't too likely), any more than it depends on them going and getting GTK and making their own browsers. What mattered was whether software developers and companies that make and distribute network software found it useful.
Like it or not, there are lots of AOL users out there. Even if all 30 million people out their don't upgrade anytime soon, there will still be enough to matter. Each day I browser in Mozilla, more and more sites render correctly on it.
Most importantly, sites that say "works best in Internet Explorer" may have to reevaluate their stance on the issue.
Netscape is about to be back in the ring, and just lined up millions of people in their corner. Standards might mean something again soon.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
Farting around not getting anywhere? You know AOL *did* decide to use it.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
In short, I think this is a bluff on AOLs part
Even if it is a bluff, to be successful in brinksmanship against Microsoft, you must be prepared to go all the way, and you may actually need to go all the way.
What AOL has to consider is its 34million users turning round and saying "the latest version of AOL is broke", if it's not rendering IE specific content correctly.
While this may be true, the number of sites that utilize MS specific technologies is actually fairly small. But regardless of the percentage that do use broken HTML, if AOL is going to move away from IE they have to do it sooner rather than later. *If* MS comes up with some new whiz-bang HTML "extension" and it catches on, AOL will have less room to maneuver.
I don't think AOL wants to be dependant upon MS for the browser. The sooner they break away from MS and start using Gecko the better not only for AOL, but the net as a whole.
- Rev.What AOL has to consider is its 34million users turning round and saying "the latest version of AOL is broke", if it's not rendering IE specific content correctly.
While some of them are certainly going to complain to AOL, others will complain to the webmasters. And when enough webmasters make their sites standards-complaint, less users will complain to AOL. Let's hope the number of compliant sites reaches a critical mass before AOL decides to drop Gecko.
This is your sig. There are thousands more, but this one is yours.
The company that owns the content for a lot of the pages that the 34 million AOL users (and the rest of the net) is AOL. Aside AOLs own pages, there's the entire Netscape portal site, the CNN and related websites, the warner music and film sites, etc.
Furthermore, what website wouldn't adjust it's pages if not doing so lost visibility to that kind of user base?
"notice how fast AOL took on this project?"
Hmmm... They started this project in November of 1998 when they announced the acquisition of Netscape.
So it's taken just over 3 years to get to a beta stage. Fast in geological time keeping, but certainly not what we used to call internet time.
They did this once before, though. If I remember correctly, when AOL made the switch to IE, Netscape had a strong majority of the browser market and IE was still of the very poor quality that you can expect from early Microsoft releases. Websites were targetted to Netscape at the time, there were pages that didn't render right in IE, and yet AOL made the switch.
The other thing to consider is that Mozilla's rendering is downright excellent these days. I haven't had any problems rendering sites with it for a long time now. Are users really going to be getting a lot of error messages after the switch? And even if they do, why would they blame AOL? Years of Windows use has conditioned people to expect errors all the time which they can't do anything about so they shrug their shoulders and move on.
AOL has been testing Mozilla with their Compuserve users for awhile now and the tests have reportedly gone well. I don't think this is a bluff.
-----
Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
I agree, it is possible that this blows up in AOL's face. From my point of view, who cares? Maybe AOL loses 10 million customers - no skin off my nose. What I like is that I can now say to my boss, "In a year or so there are going to be 30 million AOL users forced into using the Gecko rendering engine. We need to write good front end code." And that statement won't be 100% true but the concept is right and even better, it will work.
For the record, while Opera's layout engine and CSS support is excellent, it's DOM (Javascript) capabilities are very poor.
explain to me what the hell Opera has to do with how well Mozy renders?
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
If AOL really does switch browsers, then some interestings may happen that will show us who really has the power to control the Internet. The key issue is whether or not the owners of the non-conforming web sites will fix their sites. If they do, then that would prove that Microsoft does control the net (yet). On the other hand, if the owners of non-conforming sites do not fix their pages, then that proves Microsoft is already in defacto control.
Now some readers are probably dismissing this as too simplistic:
Can AOL really change the net? You gotta be kidding! It's not that simple!
I'm not kidding. I think that it really does come down to AOL vs. MS. The Internet is driven by content, and if a abrupt change by one company (AOL) can reverse the non-conformance trend that Microsoft has been pushing for several years, then that will illustrate just how influencial AOL (by way of it's web brower) can be.
Of course, if AOL's current test is just a bluff to try to improve their business position with Microsoft, then that will prove that MS is already in control.
And that would mean that the sucess of .NET is almost certain.
The answer is: Market Share
No company is going to leave its web site unavailable to 34 million people, not when they can make the site standards-compliant and work in both IE and AOL. Netscape 4.x is a different matter, granted - you almost had to have two copies of your site for a while. But if AOL uses Gecko, then the web's back to only one site for everyone, and all of us using non-IE browsers will benefit from that. AOL's 34 million newbies could be the best thing that's happened to the web in the last couple years (betcha never saw that coming :).
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Probably not. Linux is still a bit of a niche desktop market, and AOL doesn't see it as cost-effective to support.
It's an economic thing called "marginal cost." To release a client for YipeeOS, they need to write the client, debug the client, test it on a wide variety of hardware/software configurations, and then distribute the new client alongside the AOL client for Windows (increasing burning time and making the install process ever so slightly more complicated). AOL's current policy is to provide free tech support to all customers, so they also have to write a knowledge database for that client, and train at least a few techs in using it.
It was worthwhile for them to release a Macintosh client, and at some point the beancounters will have to admit that it's worthwhile to support Linux. At the moment, I think AOL's best option would be to release an unsupported Linux client (for download rather than CD-based distribution). I know there are people out there who would use it.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
> I think this is the end of days for IE.
Not with 100's of millions of users not knowing what Mozilla is.
Not with IE being intregrated to Windows.
Not with future development of IE (mozilla have tabs? hah, we'll put it in too).
IE is still supported by a lot more sites..
Former Netscape 4.x users won't forget easily how bad ns 4.x was.
It won't happen this way. You see, Mozilla is able to render most pages, and if anything is missing, it is often menus used for navigation (because they are based on proprietary IE-extensions). What happens when an AOL user sees such a site? He sees the contents, but has no idea how to browse the site. Who does he blame? The site of course! He thinks the designer of the site is silly not to have placed proper menus in place for navigation. So he takes his business elsewhere.
After all, he is using AOL and everything, so it must be the site's fault! :)
Clever signature text goes here.
It's easy to envisage AOL doing this until one considers that content on the Web has adapted to a large degree to IE dominance
And with that you're suggesting we should leave it at that and better all go the Microsoft way? AOL is in a position to do this, and now is the best time to do it, because "IE only" websites are few and far between.
What AOL has to consider is its 34million users turning round and saying "the latest version of AOL is broke", if it's not rendering IE specific content correctly.
AOL is already getting it's partners to change their websites such, that they render with mozilla/gecko. Also, why do you think they're announcing this move to another browser in advance? If i were a webmaster of some large site i'd already see to it, that it will look fine for AOL-users when the switch happens (well, i'd have made it work with mozilla anyway, but that's another subject). So even AOLs announcement of the switch will clue some webadmins up, that that "IE only" sign on their site might be a bad idea. Also some of the AOL users might love mozilla just for the fact that you can switch off those pesky automatic popup Windows (if AOL leaves that in), since they make surfing the Web a major pain.
Yes I know Mozillas recent [good] record on standards compliance, but as it stands MS is holding the baton.
And unless someone changes that it will be so forever. MS is "holding the baton" because 99% of websurfers out there use IE. And AOL obviously has the ability to change this. Now you're arguing, that AOL must continue to go with IE because of some sites that are "IE only". But those sites only exist because 99% of the websurfers are using IE, effectively closing the circle. But i think once AOL switched to mozilla those sites will change their policy fast or face some major problems (as in 30% less traffic).
In short, I think this is a bluff on AOLs part, as there's too much commercial risk here, and there's no way AOL is going to take those risks (with a relatively dumb userbase), with the possibility of large user unhappiness.
The alternative is for AOL to make their business dependent on Microsofts IE. Past history has shown, that that it is a bad idea to depend too much on Microsoft Products, because when they want to extend their business into your market it gives them an easy way to kick you out of business and win your customers over.
I think the AOL executives prefer to take a little risk (i don't think it all that big) to just waiting until Microsoft stabs them in the back.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
And what's that "extension?" Personally, I think it'll be a Microsoft-led effort to replace Java applets with
Yes, I already know that browser-embedded Java isn't a great technology either, but at least it's available on every platform. If we ended up with a Web largely dependent on
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
It's not that simple and all application vendors are faced with this problem. Most vendors solve it by simply requiring red hat linux to be installed, reliefing them of the need to test with other distributions. Differences between distributions include version differences in among others kernel, compiler, libraries, x windows, desktop environment. Each of these may have version specific bugs that may or may not influence other packages. It's nearly impossible to test for all possible combinations. In addition, all distributions are updated frequently and typically have a lot of changes between versions. It's nearly impossible to keep up with that.
Support also is difficult since there are so many distribution specific problems that may prevent a program from working as intended. Imagine a user calling and asking "I can't load any site with AOL 7 on linux" or a similarly vague question. A good heuristic to approaching such a client would be to figure out whether the network is configured correctly. On windows that is easy since all versions of windows have a control panel with network settings and there are only minor differences between the different versions. On linux each distribution allows multiple ways of configuring the network and there are likely to be significant differences between each distribution and even among different versions of the same distribution. Almost certainly a proper solution to any problems with the configuration will require editing text files and work on the commandline. Not a problem for advanced users but a nightmare for the average AOL helpdesk staff and AOL user.
Jilles
I predict that when AOL controls the server AND client, they will take off into an AOL proprietary universe over the next few years. There wil then be the internet and there will be AOL. I mean it's practically that way now. But because they didn't own the browser in the past they had to stick with web standards and people could use other browsers to get to their network. As soon as AOL 8 is completely installed (Still a couple years at least for full conversion) there will be no reason to stick soley with standards any more. They will be a embracin' and a extendin' with the best of them...
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!