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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."
It will finally force web authors to support standards not monopolies.
...And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me." - Martin Niemoeller (1892-1984)
I think this bubble is getting ready to burst. The only thing preventing it previously was its massive size. Too bad for Time-Warner! They really dicked over their company. Im sure the execs promoting the merger got gobs of cash, tho.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
Gecko will save you 30% or more on Internet browsers... wait... Did i get that wrong?
Good deal, AOL is doomed for one reason- people learned how to use the internet. It was the intermediary, but no longer with the advent of popular broadband.
Every now & again we get another "leaked" memo/whatever from AOL hinting that they're going to drop IE.
And every time, AOL are just about to go into negotiation with Microsoft & want a bargaining chip to reduce licensing costs.
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
So now, if someone says their ISP is "Netscape", you're not sure if they're clueless or really telling the truth.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Who'da thunk that AOL would become a heavyweight in the battle for standardization on the internet against Microsoft? Strange days indeed!
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Every time I see an AOL commercial on TV, I think "man, their advertising department needs to be shot."
If I wasn't so entrenched in my current e-mail, I'd consdier getting AOL on top of my RoadRunner account. For the same price as RR, I'd get a whole slew of content et al that isn't out on the web at large.
I remember how AOL used to be, back in the days before my parents bailed and got a local ISP. It was fast, volomious, and the "custom AOL" bits were far slicker than anything i've seen before or since.
Forget about the ISP bit--let the market have that crowd. AOL should go after folks who have an internet connection, by promoting what they can do that the rest of the 'net can't.
If their only pitch is that they're easy to use, then they're going to get taken off just like any other set of training wheels.
On an unrelated note, Wonder why Phoenix developement seems to have slowed down. Their 0.5 release was two mohts ago.
How about "YES, I'm a Slashdot reader... and an AOL user."
AOL redistributes and (IIRC) repackages IE.
They pay money to do that.
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)
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.......
The real question is: does AOL have a future?
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
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.
Urmmm, and? Are they somehow mutually exclusive?
To some folks, yes.
I don't mean those semi-animated storybooks like Final Fantasy that call themselves RPGs. I mean real, create storytelling, pen-and-paper RPGs.
You know, the ones that had organizations founded to shut them down because they were "satanic."
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...
...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.
Granted, I think AOL sucks. I wouldn't use it. But no one (including anyone in Soviet Russia) is forced to use it.
What about Xbox Live users in areas where Time Warner Cable is the only cable company and the telephone company does not provide DSL service? In their case, the only residential-priced high-speed Internet access option is through a company owned by AOL.
Will I retire or break 10K?
YOU do... and that's great. Actually a very valid point you have. The problem is will little tiny companies such as, oh, CITIBANK that have a "few" customers! What is a shame is the fact that they have to use IE to bank. I've tried Citibank for Business online, and Safari fails. KDE fails. Mozilla works, but only with the prefs bar plugin to change the id string to IE on WinXP. Otherwise Citibank fails. The problem is not the sites you design, but the corporate sites that millions of people would like to use to shop, bank, etc to make their lives a little easier. And needing IE to use these sites makes life easier, but a lot less secure.
I've had e-mail exchanged with Citibank on this topic, and they only test for IE and, to quote, "most of the time Netscape too". MOST OF THE TIME? Great.
If 32,000,000+ people are using Gecho engine (assuming AOL makes the switch), this will be great because it could very well force companies to do what you do! USe their frontpage but with the propper settings so HTML is clean and pure and written as per the standards. This can only be DoublePlusGood(TM) for IE, Netscape, Gecho, Moz, KDE, Safari et. al.
I have used AOL quite a bit (3 of my 4 computers bought at different times came with free 6 months of AOL each).
3
With most AOL versions, I noticed that AOL browser was really using IE behind the scenes(albeit few extra bugs and inferior performance).
They didn't even put Netscape on their own product!! I hope that browser wars continue and Mozilla/Gecko/Konquerer/Opera etc become better...
AOL is fading out because it was based on premise that most users are dumb/untrained enough to figure out the web themselves. But as users are catching on, they are noticing that they can get better value for money with broadband... AOL just didn't adapt well assuming that there will always be plethora of people who want the simplicity and will pay $23.90 per month for that.
Also, check out this hilarious MP3 - http://www.trashtalkerdoll.com/sounds/indian_5.mp
So pay $x per month for their access-AOL-from-another-ISP service (yes it does exist).
The dangerous hypothetical case here deals with those ISPs who offer exclusive content but do not offer a reduced-price "bring your own access" plan like AOL does.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Hmmm, you must come from a very wierd part of the world.
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!
Now that truly would be awesome. For thin clients it would be exactly the way to go. If AOL has sufficiently abstracted itself from the Windows API it could be plugged in to just about any back-end (Linux, whatever) and set up to be bootable, maybe from a 200MB disk-on-a-chip. Turn on the PC, instant boot, instant net connection, Java, Flash, MP3 and RealAudio on-board... It would be a boon for those internet terminals they have at airports or for other thin client solutions.
I got a sig so you would remember me.
She just turns on the power and *blam* instant usable system.
So, would that be AOL TV (defunct) or MSN TV (evil)?
Mozilla: Destroy all Browsers
(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.
no thats never been done before....
Knoppix
List of Mirrors
or has it?
--meh--
I have netscape 6.something (one of those that netscape released before Mozilla was at 1.0) under win2k on my laptop. Hotmail gave me a connection refused error when my wife tried to use it to access her hotmail account the other day. Netscape 4.7 under Linux works just fine with hotmail. In this case, since netscape 6 was so buggy anyway, I am inclined to give hotmail the benefit of the doubt. But still, any program remotely pretending to be anything close to a browser should be able to at least fetch the html that a site serves up even if it can't render it exactly the way the page designer expected.
FreeSpeech.org
There was a time in the not too-distant past when this might have mattered. "AOL's adoption of Netscape and Gecko will force websites to comply ... blah, blah, blah." But it's hard for me to believe now, that in their weakened state, AOL carries more than a faint wisp of the influence they might have wielded. How many balls can you drop before the audience yawns and goes home?
Wouldn't web design be so much easier if everyone just used Word? Forms, macros, print preview.
This is what I tell people who design only for IE.
Who cares about standards? Obviously idiots don't.
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.
From the article:
Any references?
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
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!
That's Gecko, not GEICO.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
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
What I am seeing here is pretty sad though. Your sig says, "YES, I'm a Christian... and a RPG gamer." but I really dont see any point of stating that fact. My house is tan and I have a black cat, but who really gives a shit? All I see is a troll who just wants everyone to know hes a christian just in case any of us wanted to know, and hey, he also sits around and plays games!!
I think id rather deal with the satanists then a bunch of people who go out of their way to let me know what religion they happen to believe in.. at least satanists seem to be quieter about their worships..
>AOL is almost a complete Operating System
Well I don't know if its a complete but they like DirectPC have put a lot of programming effort to replicate things that Linux users have come to have taken for granted like proxying. I've always wondered why they didn't just build a box with an embeded app with linux all preconfigured to connect to their service? plug one end into the phone and the other end to the computer via ethernet and turn it on.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
There is no way you want AOL to die right now. With the economy down the crapper all this country needs is another company going belly up. Although I do not like them personally, I realize that they are a pretty big employer. As long as AOL can pay its employees they should try and reorganize/review their business, but not go out of it. During the past fiscal year we had enough Enrons. Let's not make it a habit :)
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.
Uhhmmm... No, it's not.
If he's got this wrong, what else has he got wrong?
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
In short they are hostage to Microsoft and paying them money for the privilege. It is clearly in their interest to dump it as soon as humanly possible. Now they could do that right now, but I expect they are concerned about their user 'experience' and determining the best way to make the break. Still, it is possible to see from the fact that Gecko has made its way into Compuserve and AOL for OS X and a few other places that they're chipping away at the block. Hopefully such efforts although peripheral to the main AOL client will begin to have an affect on the web landscape.
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"?
you're arguing a different point. The parent was defening FrontPage 2002. Citibank may be written exclusively for IE, but that doesn't mean it has anything to do with Frontpage. In fact, I would say that anyone who bothers to do a browser check is a bit too advanced to use FP to do anything other than draw tables.
I am not defending IE-only sites and neither was the parent. He was defending FrontPage 2002.
But, in response to your point, we need to keep hounding anyone who produces www sites that require a certain browser. About 2 years ago, most comples sites had to ignore Netscape 4.x (or do twice as much work) because it was such a piece of crap. After a couple years of that mindset, you can't expect everyone to reverse that in a couple months. I am lucky enough to have been able to test my sites on Netscape 6.1 enough to be able to code once for Netscape and IE and have it work, but that is only because I put in the time to "unlearn" much of what I was doing in the years 2000 and 2001.
The truth doesn't care what I think.
Having to reboto every time you want to go online? Sounds like a smashing idea.
how do you get your backgrounds to work correctly in table cells in IE? IE puts the top of the image at the top of the cell when it's supposed to be at the top of the page. Netscape and Safari (the only other browsers I've tested on) handle table cell backgrounds correctly. This causes a bit of disruption for my pages, but I can work around it.
How do you handle it?
The truth doesn't care what I think.
No offence to the author of the article, but is there any basis to it besides I've been lucky enough to receive some interesting information from within the Netscape/AOLTW firewall?
It may be true -- don't know -- but I need a reason to believe it's not merely rumor. How do we know your source is reliable or well-informed?
When Time-Warner and AOL merged everybody said the media world had changed forever. Turns out they were wrong. In the high flying days of the stock market boom any merger seemed like a good idea. I am willing to bet all the people involved in the TW/AOL merger think it was a big mistake now. What were they thinking anyway? "In the future the Internet will only consist dial-up connections through AOL servers and we can give them Time-Warner content". People move on and sometimes technology does not. I am not saying that AOL will cease to exist, there will always be a place for them in the Internet world, but to believe that they would be a dominant player because they are right now is ludicrous. I predict TW/AOL will eventually become two separate companies again, the writing is on the wall.
And how is this really different from AOL right now? On my fiancee's machine (and her roommate's) whenever AOL is started it up, it locks up the machine about half the time, so it needs to be rebooted anyway.
Granted, the machines are running 98 and ME, but when using a real dial-up connection (non-AOL) on the same machines, it doesn't crash half as often...
To be honest i'm not sure why AOL/TW haven't sold/EOLed Netscape long ago.
Why do you suppose AOL bought Netscape in the first place?
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.
This is precisely what they're planning. If you'd bothered to RTFA, you might have noticed that in addition to Mac OS X and Linux, they're looking at PDAs and cell phones.
Plop in an IE control and you can be done with it. It'd save them a lot of grief.
That works on Win32, but not on any other platform (yes, there are ports of IE on other platforms, but I believe it can only be used in this way on Win32). Microsoft may have 90% market share now, but that's slowly dropping. What about when it gets down to 80%? What if it gets down to 70%? What if AOL only worked on 70% of personal computers? What if MSN only worked on 70% while AOL worked on 95%?
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
AOL don't want to put themselves in a position where Microsoft can hold them over the barrel - sure, the ActiveX control can be used by them today, but what about tomorrow? Being independant for them makes sense.
AOL did something good!
Now, all we have to do is rid them of all their evilness, the moneychasing and all and we'll be happy! Yay!
If you're happy and you know it read my blog
Every story submission on slashdot amounts to nothing more than plagerism. All they do is copy the first paragraph of the story they link to. It makes it look like the submitter wrote the text, when in fact the text has been stolen.
Write your own damned words!
I think id rather deal with the satanists then a bunch of people who go out of their way to let me know what religion they happen to believe in.. at least satanists seem to be quieter about their worships..
/., and I operate differently here.
This is
I don't go up to people and say "hiya, I'm a Christain and I want to introduce you to Fuzzy Jr." But on slashdot, I've found that it solves more issues than it starts to get the "I believe in a religion, and it's not Bhuddism" point out of the way as early as possible.
If you can think of a nice, subtle way to point that out, I'd love to hear it.
It's worked with Mozilla as long as I can remember.
Religion is the opium of the people. Evolution is the opium of scientists.
Gecko includes a lot of extras, such as it's AWT-alike (abstract windowing toolkit), these AFAIK are not actually needed.
Mozilla & Netscape include loads of extras (mail, news, IM, i.e its a Application Suit not a browser).
Plus things like KHTML (Apple uses this) are smaller than the Gecko engine, but not quite as compilent. h1:after { content: "Stuff"; } for example.
Wow, I should not post when knackered.