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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.
I wonder if Mozilla will be shipped with Windows clients in the future
As already reported here in April bits of AOL are already doing this.
I wonder how 24 will end this Tuesday.
he saves the other guys life!!!! [scoup: you heard it here first!!]
I used Opera way back in January, but stopped because it crashed even more.
I've been running up-to-date versions of OS X, and with the exception of adding a monitor and mouse, my system is not unusual.
Occasionally, I ssh to my linux box and remote display Mozilla for Linux for stability. Usually, I just open a few different browsers. That way, an Omniweb crash won't take down my Mozilla or IE windows (redundancy). I never started doing this until I realized how much they crash.
This could be a very bad thing for the Mac in general and OS X in particular if AOL doesn't actually switch their Windose users too.
I use Mozilla and love it but it isn't nearly compatible enough with the lousy websites out there for your average AOL user to use.
Now if they do the same for AOL on MSFT Windows then that is a whole different story. That is a very good thing because it will force many of those poorly designed websites to actually do W3C compliant sites. That will be good for everybody except Microsoft's monopoly.
Do you realize that writing is a form of expression?
Do you realize that many writers use these methods to this to stress a redundancy, stress an iterative process or just to make you think about what you are reading?
Do you realize that Pudge isn't CmdrTaco so that we can give him the benefit of the doubt?
well, it doesn't look like you care either, so you have just proved my point.
Need to get away?
Adirondack Vacations
IE is by far the better browser in terms of compatibility with the majority of websites. Mozilla is just not being developed fast enough.
Hmm... not sure if you are trolling or not. With that second sentence, I'd have to say yes. Anyway, when something doesn't work in Mozilla, but does in IE, it's 99.99% certain that it's a bug in the website code, where it isn't correct HTML/ECMAscript/CSS. So, a more accurate statement would be "IE is by far the better browser at guessing at what brain-dead authors meant to do."
Have you ever tried Mozilla and compared the compatibility to the official W3C standards? Or did you just take some sites which use special IE only tags? Yes IE ist the best "Microsofts own web standard" browser but Mozilla is the best official web standard browser.
And why is Mozilla not fest enough developed. They started from scratch with no code (they decided to not use the Netscape code) in 1999. At this time Microsoft already developed their IE for years and the initial code base has been bought from another company! And now Mozilla is much more compatible to the web standards and has much more features (tabs, better security/cookie handling, zoom...).
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
The Wachovia online banking site doesn't support Netscape 6 or Mozilla. The site is frames based and uses javascript for quite a bit of it's functionality.
I've yelled at them myself in the past, but they've only written back stating that since both browsers are considered BETA, they weren't going to support them.
Another voice wouldn't hurt. It would help if you had an account of course.
https://myaccounts.wachovia.com/
I tried logging in, but it didn't work. thanks!
cpeterso
I have an iBook running OS X, and I've run at least all Mozilla versions 0.9.6 through 0.9.9, and I haven't seen Mozilla crash once in all that time. I also used multiple versions of Mozilla in OS 9 without many crashes (none that I can remember off hand, but that's been a while). Now that's not to say that Mozilla doesn't crash , I have seen it crash (mostly in Windows), just not on my iBook. I occasionally quit Mozilla due to its memory leaks it swells to use a large amount of swap space, but luckily with OS X's great VM it generally causes no problems, and doesn't slow down too much, so I leave Mozilla running constantly so I don't have to wait for it to start. I generally quit and reopen once a month. I leave my laptop on all the time, and just put it to sleep when I don't need it. The only problem that I have currently with Mozilla in OS X is that Java stopped working.(Bug 8337) I think that happened in 0.9.8. Prior to that Java had been working fine. I even downloaded the special beta plugin for Java, but I couldn't get it to work. It's probably my problem since I didn't try that hard, and I don't go to many sites that use Java anyway, but occasionally I find sometime that I need it. So that's only a minor annoyance for me.
I wonder if this will pave the way to a a full-fledged Linux version of AOL.
Yeah, because all of the Linux users I know are simply dying to use AOL.
On another note, I'm hoping that the AOL client browser has the tabbed browsing from Moz in the future. Man, this rocks -- Mozilla 1.0 RC2 has completely replaced OmniWeb as my browser of choice on OS X.
(I do sort of miss the spall checker, though.)
--saint
Compatibility with IE isn't always a good thing. There are a few sites that give me problems in OmniWeb, mainly running movies in Javascript windows, but on the other hand, I get few pop-up windows, NO pop-behind windows, and generally have less bothersome advertising to worry about. I consider the end result to be a positive.
Granted that I've not tried Mozilla, and haven't used Navigator since 4.x. I may have to look at Mozilla sometime. But I'm quite happy with OmniWeb.
"Common Sense Ain't" -Unknown
I really like the tabs in Mozilla too, and it's faster than MSIE.
-- if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic - Lewis Carrol
Thanks for bringing that up! The true irony, is that the company was Spyglass, and the code was for the Mosaic browser. Mosaic was of course bought by Spyglass from a company also called Mosiac that made a little web browser called Netscape! Another interesting tidbit, is that MS paid very little for the code, as they worked out a deal in which Spyglass would be paid royalties with every copy of IE that MS sold ... but then MS decided to give it away for free, and Spyglass gets nothing in return!
-- if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic - Lewis Carrol
Saying that IE is the better browser in terms of compatability is true - it got that way by forcing it's own standards on web developers, not conforming to the web standards already in place - which is what Mozilla does, and does well. Sorry to say it, but problems like this are not the fault of Mozilla porters - it's the fault of web designers who fail to use the proper standards.
Try moving to Mozilla RC2 - that has fixed a couple bugs. I haven't yet had a crash with Mozilla, but I avoided the nightly builds, for the most part, and stuck with the trunks.
This is absolutley correct, a lot of people at college used to start arguments with me about how IE is the best browser (I was using Netscape Communicator at the time, now I use Opera v6.02, thinking about trying Mozilla too). They always give me the argument that all websites work on it, when in reality it's all because IE is very forgiving on errors in the HTML code (one of my favs is when people don't have the closing </table> tag in a table. It displays fine in IE but it wouldn't display in Netscape because Netscape knew it was bad code)
Now I'm sure some of you are saying "the browser should be forgiving, a lot of people simply can't write W3C compliant HTML and I shouldn't have to miss out on their page just because my browser won't forgive a few mistakes" what I say to that is that forgiving browsers promote bad HTML coding (also the fact that most amature web designers only use IE to preview their sites doesn't help much either). Of course real pros know that not everyone going to their site is going to use IE and so they try very hard to make compliant code, but a lot of the internet isn't pro grade and unless people are forced to write proper HTML (just as programers are forced to write proper C code) then people will continue to make webpages that don't display correctly in all browsers.
I'm quite frankly surprised how many people are coming out with some sort of support for Internet Explorer for Mac OS X. For me Mozilla offers the far better browsing experience, mainly because it's far less prone to crashes, more responsive and doesn't have that annoying bug where content sometimes fails to display on web pages which seem to load perfectly normal (yet the content displays fine if you force the window to be updated somehow). Text boxes also frequently update wrong as well. I find it hard to believe that no-one else is experiencing these major bugs in Internet Explorer. And if they are, I can't comprehend how anyone can live with such bugs. Mozilla is also open source so I am refreshed that if anything pissed me off too much about it I could just change it myself. The same can't be said about Internet Explorer.
You're obviously missing something. The IE engine on the Macintosh is different than that for Windows. Switching away from the IE/Mac engine won't affect compatibility.
And your statement that "Mozilla is not being developed fast enough" is idiotic at best. It took Microsoft much longer to get to where it is in IE than Mozilla did to get where it is, and Mozilla is a better browser.
I doubt it. Microsoft has already taken away their part of the bargain (AOL on every Windows desktop), and knows it's just a matter of time before AOL removes IE from its browser.
You have you history of the Web browser a little confused. Spyglass made IE, yes. Mosaic didn't make Netscape. Netscape was started by a group of people that left NCSA's Mosaic team.
I have a website. It's about Macs.
Right, except the company was originally named Mosaic and they called the browser Netscape. Later they renamed the company Netscape and called the browser Navigator, but this was after they sold the original browser code to Spyglass.
I've read this a few times on the web.... I'm sure you can find it
-- if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic - Lewis Carrol
(one of my favs is when people don't have the closing tag in a table. It displays fine in IE but it wouldn't display in Netscape because Netscape knew it was bad code)
I love that argument. You can't seriously think that netscape detects the broken html and makes a political decision not to show it! A missing could distort your page on IE. In netscape it would crash the browser. Obviously this shows that netscape was a superior product. One crashes, user gets pissed off with the browser, the other just goes on fine, user doesn't even know the html is bad. Yup, I can tell you which I'd rather be using.
Send lawyers, guns, and money!