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."

Comments

Re:Only good news

[accessdeniednsp]

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.

Re:They've threatened it before

[Reziac]

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.

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.h tm -- beware the slashdot space.)

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. :)