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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."
I, for one, am grateful that the Mozilla project has remained somewhat separate from AOL. Sure, it's got some high profile Netscape people working on it, but in a traditional business sense it's not connected to AOL at all.
AOL are up to numerous shenanigans right now. They're banning legitimate e-mail from TONS of servers. Their support for side projects is waning. Subscribers are leaving. It's a mass exodus, and all because they won't get with the times.
I have clients who haven't been getting enquiries from their Web site, simply because a whole batch of Web host IPs got banned from sending mail to AOL.
I used to be semi-pro AOL. I knew most Internet geeks didn't like their service, but I recommended them to newbies, since they do have a good 'get running quickly' service that's easy to understand. No more. My clients complain they receive TONS of spam now, despite AOL's OTT screening and banning.
AOL is getting everything it deserves. Let's hope this sealed off network dies a death. Even Bill Gates had the insight to ditch his plans to have MSN as a sealed off network. It's time for AOL to do the same.
Mozilla will live on regardless.
mogorific carpentry experiments
Yeah, you have an excellent point there. If AOL shifts over to Gecko use, websites will be urged to move away from proprietary bullshit Internet Explorer HTML, and back over to the "real" HTML 4.0 standard. But wait, I just realized that in order for websites to make themselves more compliant, they have to actually hire a web designer with talent instead of using MS FrontPage and the lovely HTML it produces.
rm -rf sig
Are there really that many web sites out there that are viewable only with IE? I rarely come across any, anymore.
--sex
Very popular slashdot journal for adul
Are you completely sure about that? Last i checked there were dozens of free (and commercial) web browsers that embedded an IE ActiveX control just like AOL does. That was the whole point of having IE integrated into the operating system in the first place! If you wanted you could rewrite Notepad to display HTML instead of TXT and do it in about 20 lines of VB or whatever programming language you like.
To be honest i'm not sure why AOL/TW haven't sold/EOLed Netscape long ago. Unless they're planning on providing services for other platforms, there just doesn't seem to be a lot of money in developing a separate web browsing platform. Plop in an IE control and you can be done with it. It'd save them a lot of grief.
I got a sig so you would remember me.
I was a victim of the mentioned "Black Wednesday" and from the view I got from the inside, forward thinking like this is quickly brought down, and back in line with the corporate philosophy that "we can do no wrong". I don't know how many times I worked hard to make a positive change within the company just to end up suffering for it, ultimately losing my job. (Posted AC for obvious reasons)
One of the few important ones, at least for Windows users, is the windowsupdate site. They do provide an alternative for other browsers, but that means manual downloads, no automated check as to what patches you already have installed. The bank that I use also appear not to allow Phoenix in. :(
I for one welcome our new SCOviet Russian overlords to whom all our base are belong.
It's dangerous to have ISP's with specialized content that only people who connect to that iSP can access. It could theoritically lead to the fragmantaion of the Internet, where you can only go to 15 - 20% of the content of the Internet due to the fact that the rest would be blocked off cause you don't connect to the other ISPs.
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
Proof the AOL community is coming of age and realizing that AOL != the internet...?
I doubt it. More than likely it is the 14 million mozilla users downloading Netscape 7x just to get the email dictionary. After installing it they just delete the software. Besides myself, I know several mozilla users who did this.
Enjoy,
It's just the normal noises in here.
Crimson Editor color-codes HTML, too. It doesn't do that other stuff, but it's quite a bit cheaper.
.NET (I'm sure I'll get modded down for saying that) for my editing, since it does color-coding, automatic end-tab completion, automatic spacing, grouping of different pages in the same project space, and so I can see the webpage in progress.
Of course, I'm not really the type to edit HTML in a text editor much, either. Lately, I've been relying on Visual Studio
Unfortunately, it's made me very lazy with my HTMLing. With all the stuff it does for me, I'm not to confident in my ability to write neat and good HTML without it's help. But it does make my work go a lot faster...
Insightful: 76, Off-Topic: 379, Flamebait: 24, Funny: 152, Interesting: 201, Underrated: 55, Troll: 9, Total: 896
...Kill Netscape, make Mozilla the only browser you offer.
...try to make products with a purpose, not just because you have programmers and have to keep them busy. :)
Take Mozilla, and separate the Mail, Composer, and Instant messaging aspects of the program and build them into separate downloads...get rid of all the other bloat..
Kill ICQ and AIM, and come up with one Instant messenger, that uses both ICQ numbers and AIM nicknames.
...and lastly try to be profitable.
AOL is almost a complete Operating System. I keep waiting for AOL to release a bootable CD-Rom that completely bypasses Windows. Just about the only thing they were missing was a browser - now they have that too.
I am actually looking forward to plopping a CD in my Mom's computer and not have to worry about viri, configuration, setup, etc... She just turns on the power and *blam* instant usable system.
KangarooBox - We make IT simple!
"Are there really that many web sites out there that are viewable only with IE? I rarely come across any, anymore."
Yes. All the ones on our intranet. Mozilla doesn't support NTLM authentication.
Not necessarily. Many web designers today know very little HTML, because they're relied on tools like Dreamweaver to write it for them...and Dreamwaver outputs junk most of the time (not to mention their javascript output still attempts to be functional in 3.x browsers). When Macromedia and the other web dev vendors produce tools that churn out W3C validated content by default (I read an article recently on how to get DW to output XHTML, and I laughed), then I'll start using one. AOL should pay Macromedia to make Gecko the rendering engine in DW, instead of IE.
The difference now is that Microsoft is gunning for AOL's core market. Microsoft has shown again and again they don't like to coexist with anyone. They don't always suceed in dominating (Xbox), but AOL can't be too happy about them trying. Right now AOL has a lot of leverage because of it's large subscriber base. If AOL didn't work well with Windows, people might well try another platform (more likely Mac than linux, unfortunately)
The real interesting thing will be seeing if the Wintel monopoly can survive PS2s with internet access and cheap Linux PCs. Especially the PS2s. After all, to the basic end user, a linux PC is nothing more than a $300+ (after Monitor) Wordprocessor/internet appliance (few games, limited multimedia support, still no legal dvd player). The PS2 has the potential to do everything a Wintel PC does, and for $200 bucks.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I think the biggest problem AOL faces right now is conservatism. They're big, so they have alot to lose, so they "play it safe".
Yet if they don't bet the farm on something meaningful pretty much right away, there won't be a farm to bet.
Yes, they'd be hideously stupid not to sell a "baby AOL" branded thru Lindows/Mandrake and Wal-mart. They could/should also provide a similar, rebrandable offering through computer shops and other vendors, not just Wal-mart! I know that alot of vendors would start selling it immediately if they could get a buck or two per month + some setup.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
AOL lost no money in 2002. In fact they made $7 billion. These "news reports" are journalists misleading their readers again because having a headline "AOL looses $100 billion" sounds cool and sells copy. In fact, the "loss" refers to the fact that AOL Time Warner is worth less than when they were valued at the time of the merger. Amazing news! Imagine a company worth less now than at the peak of the dot-com bubble!
Is Gecko actually a good thing? When Apple were looking for a browser core to use for Safari, they chose khtml over gecko, because it's cleaner. In reply to this one of the Mozilla guys (I think it was jwz, but don't quote me on that) basically said 'Fair point, our API is really bad in a lot of places and our code is bloated and ugly' (I paraphrase). 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.) If AOL, or anyone, are thinking of using Gecko then they need to atack the source code with a chainsaw first. 81MB may not be a lot to the average /. reader, but there are a lot of AOL customers out there with only 128MB of ram (or even less, you can run Windows 95 quite happily in 32MB, and I'm sure a lot of their customers still do).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Either way, there are plenty of other stores to choose from.
I do feel your pain however about banks. My own bank steadfastly refuses to update their site to work on anything but IE and only on the PC you first registered thanks to some file it deposits there. Frankly it's a ludicrous situation especially as the service is called "Anytime". Apparantly to them Anytime, means "any time you're in front of the one machine running IE (including Java) which you registered on, but go to hell if you're a Mac or Linux user, or a Mozilla / Opera / Safari user, or sat in an Internet cafe or at another machine desperately trying to transfer funds from your own account".