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AOL Drops MSIE for Netscape in Mac OS X Beta

Posted by pudge on from the took-em-long-enough dept.

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.

1 of 55 comments (clear)

  1. Re:does anyone really care? Yes... tides change... by metacosm · · Score: 5, Informative
    "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)