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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)
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.
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)
...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.
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.
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).
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