AOL Drops MSIE for Netscape in Mac OS X Beta

Kitzilla writes "AOL introduces an 'Aquafied' client for Max OS X, and pulls the plug on Internet Explorer. It's AOL for Mac, Version 2: now with a tasty Gecko filling." news.com has a story. I wonder if Mac OS X will ever ship with a Netscape/Mozilla browser. I wonder if Mozilla will be shipped with Windows clients in the future. I wonder if this will pave the way to a a full-fledged Linux version of AOL. I wonder if this will ignite another AOL/MS war. I wonder how 24 will end this Tuesday.

Comments

Re:does anyone really care? Yes... tides change...

[metacosm]

"Compatibility with the majority of websites" is a function of popularity and user-base. Some Facts:

• When netscape 3.0 was the major player in the browser market, pages where built and tested against it, and sometimes tested against IE if the developers had the time.
  
• When IE and NS both had 30+% market share, all developers made _sure_ sites worked correctly on both browsers.
  
• As IE continued to gain market share (and because it was illegally bundled with the Operating System), developers started building more pages and only testing them against IE, because IE was _always_ going to be available on every windows PC, this trend is how IE became the dominate player in the browser space (it also, to be fair, had a very good, battle hardened development team who made amazing progress between versions 3 and 5).
  

I personally think Mozilla is making amazing progress, and with the Java and Flash plugins, there are very few websites it will not work with.
I was wondering if you could point out a few incompatable websites, so that I could yell at them about not working with my favorite browser.

Also, worth noting is some of the "better" things about Mozilla. Such as

• Tabs
  
• Themes
  
• IRC
  
• XUL (ability to build true, rich GUIs for apps)
  
• Control
  
• Download Manager
  
• Form Manager
  
• Cookie Manager
  
• Password Manager
  
• Open Source
  
• Bookmarks stored in single file (easy to share and put on the web)
  
• Easy ways to reign in bad websites (see the Advanced/Scripts section under options, it is easy to kill pop-ups, bad javascript and other icky stuff websites do)
  
• Cross Platform
  
• Free (on all platforms)
  

Re:Bad thing if it is a Mac only change

[usr122122121]

According to the article at The Register, this is the result of Microsoft-AOL disputes. Here is a quote from that article:

AOL has been using IE for six years, since it inked a deal with Microsoft to use the software in exchange for AOL icons being placed on the Windows desktop. That deal expired in January 2001, and the companies decided not to renew it after disagreeing on terms such as the default media player.

This being the case, I would find it highly unlikely that this is just a Mac OS X change.

The way I see it, this is the first step for AOL to migrate over to Netscape (remember... AOL-Netscape?), their own browser on all of their supported platforms.