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

AOL deserve what they get.

[wackybrit]

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.

Re:Only good news

[khold]

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.

Re:They've threatened it before

[$$$$$exyGal]

What we're seeing with Web sites that are viewable only with IE is the privatization of the Web, and that's a dangerous setting.

Are there really that many web sites out there that are viewable only with IE? I rarely come across any, anymore.

--sex

Another view from inside.

[Anonymous Coward]

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)

Here is my idea for AOL...

[Sophrosyne]

...Kill Netscape, make Mozilla the only browser you offer.
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.
...try to make products with a purpose, not just because you have programmers and have to keep them busy.
...and lastly try to be profitable. :)

Shameless Troll

[TheRaven64]

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).