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Mozilla, Gecko, Netscape, And Their Future At AOL
bluephone writes "I've been lucky enough to receive some interesting information from within the Netscape/AOLTW firewall, although in light of AOL's recent massive losses, poor outlook, and high profile execs resigning their positions, I'm not sure if these battle plans are still intact. As it stands, Netscape 7.x has one major release left for the forseeable future, but Gecko will soon overshadow everything, becoming the core platform for all of AOL's Internet content distribution. For all the details and much more, read it here."
No, actually AOL hosed TimeWarner, and now that AOL's glory days are over, TimeWarner execs are trying to reel the company back in. What that means for the future of AOL/Gecko/Mozilla remains to be seen.
Hate to burst your bubble, zealot, but Netscape was the first to violate HTML standards (remember blink?).
Dude, I know many people who can use "The Internet" just fine ... but still prefer AOL, because AOL provides *content*.
Just reading thru this thread so far makes me realize how there could be a market for collecting, organizing, summarizing content.
On the other hand, the alt.binaries.nospam porn newsgroups have also organized their content pretty effectively. But that's the product of a few dedicated individuals' love for pr0n and hatred of spam.
I think with MSN, Yahoo, et. al. working hard to bring the same "portal" experience to non-AOL users, AOL is kinda screwed. I did like the idea of them leveraging their Time-Warner content to AOL subscribers only, but where will that lead? The other media conglomerates will just team with/buy up/get bought by the big Internet start pages. End result: AOL might have a short-term bump but in the long run they're looking rather doomed.
Of course, if they offered broadband in my area, and they were cheap, I might get their service anyway and just use it as an Internet connection, ignoring all the AOL stuff.
I can't wait till they die. Or at least sell off their "non-core assets" as they split apart.
AOL took a look at the Braves (which they now own, along with the Atlanta Hawks and Thrashers), and decided that what the Series contender needed was:
A) to trade Kevin Millwood, best pitcher in the NL last year, to the Phillies for basically nothing in return.
B) let Cy Young winner Tom Glavine go to the Mets (both divison rivals, to boot)
and of course C) raise ticket prices.
We here in Atlanta are glad to reap the benefits of AOL's committment to quality. Paging Ted Turner.......
Not exactly on topic, but Mozilla 1.3b is out. I don't think anyone has pointed that out yet... but don't shoot me if I'm wrong!
Some new stuff, including image "auto-sizing" which is kinda nifty.
AOL is a terrible ISP. I used it for years and years, since it was v2.0. 1994, i believe. It was great, then was terrible then now is just adequate, but below par.
Alot of the "content" they have is because of the investment of other companies... People are pulling away because their "ease of use" ideals are shot.
AOL also screws up alot of different connections; takes proprietary controls in network settings and such. It's hard to network with AOL as your ISP or even resident on a system, and i think thats one of the reasons they are slowly dying.
The one thing i adore about AOL is their Mail service. The amount of spam I recieve on my XXXXX@aol.com account is actually quite limited and it's relatively secure... *Cough*Outlook Worms*Cough*
If they pull out of ISP-ing and just become an Uber-Browser/Mail Client for maybe 5 or 10$ a month and offer some of the great features- they could turn over their ISP Tech to hosting for example and become a huge webhosting mecca, for users and such- it'd be a big turn-around for them, in my opinion.
We'll see what they do with themselves now, i suppose...
Just parse it, and fix the errors. One thing that caught me off guard was you *can't* use & in an ancor tag. Example: is invalid. Where you would use &, instead use . Also always use ALT. I have few images, and most of the ones I have are non-repeating BG's of carfully created table cells (I've got my reasons) but it is important.
Oh, and I didn't put that ; at the end of my tag up there, Slashdot is messed.
Actually there are quite a few. Off the top of my head, try going here and here. These sites deliberately keep you out if you're using anything other than IE. I assume you've heard of these cars?
Do not read this
Glad to see you not succumbing entirely to the Borg. However, check out Bluefish sometime. It does a lot of what you mentioned with the other obvious side-effects (gpl, gtk1 and gtk2 ports, etc.) Dunno if there is work to port it to win32.
True, but there's a workaround.
http://www.geocities.com/rozmanov/ntlm/
(this is my understanding of it, I could be wrong)
Mozilla is an Open Source browser, based on the Open Source rendering engine (platform/middleware) Gecko.
Thus Mozilla is the interface, while Gecko does the work.
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
My only concern is that AOLTW continues to pay their development team - contrary to what some people think, Mozilla isn't all coded by like-minded geeks scattered throughout the Internet; a hell of a lot of it was bashed out by salaried Netscape employees. But if AOL want Gecko, I guess they'll have to keep coughing up.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
No... they aren't. Dreamweaver MX is light years ahead of Frontpage XP.
- SSH Support (though I have heard that a few people are having problems with it)
- Code support (syntax highlighting and auto-completion as well as code generation - which should always be used with caution) for ASP, ASP.Net, ColdFusion, JSP, PHP
- Ability to generate valid XHTML
- Advanced page templates and database objects
That's only to name a few Dreamweaver advantages. Though Frontpage definitely displays CSS2 layouts better in it's visual editor, something that I hope tha embedding of Opera may fix (but I doubt).
Dissolve... Resolve... Evolve...
Uhhmmm.... yes it is.
He means the Mac OS X AOL Client, which definitely uses Gecko. You are talking about Safari, an Apple product which has nothing to do with AOL.
Gerv
AOL lost no money in 2002. In fact they made $7 billion.
Have you actually looked at their financial statements? Apparently not. AOL had $2,291,000,000 in revenue in 2002. AOL/TW had $9,424,000,000 in revenue in 2002. (note that is revenues, not profits) They had a net loss of $54,244,000,000. And in fact they incurred this huge loss in 2002 due to writing off $80 Billion in goodwill. Goodwill is essentially how much they overpaid for their purchase of Time Warner. If you pay more than you can afford, you take a loss. What bit of that is "accounting bullshit"?
Earthlink's new Webmail requires IE6's incarnation of javascript. As a result, it does not work in Netscape 4.7x (the most prominent *installed* NS userbase). It only sorta works in NS4.80 and Mozilla. -- This caused much screaming in the earthlink.complaints newsgroup, to no avail.
h tm -- beware the slashdot space.)
:)
I'm told by a Bank of America customer that BofA's site requires IE to manage your bank account. I've heard that this is the case also for some other banks (someone hereabouts mentioned CitiBank). Irony: banks requiring use of IE for "security reasons"!!
Verizon and SoCalEdison sites were evidently only tested with IE; account management doesn't work in any version of NS or Mozilla that I tried. (For a longer rant on the subject, see 7.15.02 entry on http://home.earthlink.net/~rividh/asylum/wartime.
One problem I've seen is that frequently complaints about a website are seen ONLY by the webmaster -- who may well ignore any complaints that he doesn't feel like addressing. Hence when it's a seriously big deal, I now copy any complaints to sales, investor relations, and any other prominently "this involves money" mailtos I can locate.
[rant] It's considered good marketing wisdom that a meatspace store must ensure that no more than 5% of potential customers cannot readily use the store. Yet these same companies don't see any problem with their online presence being inaccessable to anywhere from 20% to 80% of potential customers, depending on which browsers their site excludes. What's wrong with this picture?? [/rant]
(I wrote this yesterday, but a glitch ate it before it could get posted. Hope I remembered everything on the rebound.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Is Gecko actually a good thing?
Er, yes? Gecko is the best renderer out there by a LONG way. It's the de facto standard on Linux according to my site stats, and for good reason.
When Apple were looking for a browser core to use for Safari, they chose khtml over gecko, because it's cleaner.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again, I think that was a dumb mistake. OK, so they made that decision over a year ago, when Mozilla 1.0 wasn't yet out, and the code was much worse than it is now.
Nonetheless, there are a few things people should bear in mind about this:
Firstly, the idea that because Gecko was complex, it couldn't be used in a web browser, is a dumb one. Apple have put a lot of effort into bringing KHTML up to scratch, but Gecko was already there. So, if the Galeon, Epiphany, K-Meleon and Pheonix teams can make good browsers based on it, why can't Apple? Apple have way more resources than the Galeon team. Gecko is already one of the most advanced renders out there, they wouldn't even have needed to touch most of the code.
Secondly, KHTML is still way way immature compared to Gecko. It only recently got support for XML (basic support only). It's still catching up in terms of core standards compliance, and forget about stuff like XSLT, MathML, etc. That's not to bash KHTML, what's there is good, but in terms of usefulness in browsing the web, Gecko owns it. On my site, over 50% of the hits come from Gecko based browsers, something like 40% from IE and I think about 3-4% from Konqueror. KHTML and Gecko have been choices on Linux for a long time, yet most seem to use Gecko.
To be honest, I think they chose KHTML because it was hard to make Gecko efficiently use the unusual Mac rendering model. Web browsing was really showing up the fact that Macs are slow these days, in ways that can't be disguised using hardware acceleration, or windowing system tricks etc. KHTML could be more easily hacked to get raw speed, which is clearly more important to them than features or website compatability.
I use Mozilla, and its memory usage when I last looked (yesterday) was 81MB. In contrast Opera was sitting at 10MB, rendering pages faster and supporting CSS better (Moz still doesn't support CSS counters, so I can't number headings automatically, for example.)
But Opera still has sucky DOM support (i think) etc etc. 81mb sounds very large indeed, I've never seen Moz use even half that. Bear in mind accurately measuring memory usage is hard with standard OS tools, as they usually don't adequately distinguish between shared libs etc.