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AOL Builds New IE-Based Browser
jfruhlinger writes "According to News.com.com.com, America Online is preparing to release a free AOL-branded browser that is 'based on Microsoft's Internet Explorer technology.' The browser will be available to users who don't have AOL as their ISP. I admit that I find this development baffling -- not only does AOL already own a browser, but why on earth would a non-AOL user want to use an AOL-branded version of IE?"
Affirmative! Here's a link from May of 2003. Typical AOL - it took them a year and a half to do something with the technology, and meanwhile the whole browser arena has been turned on it's ear (shameless plug for Firefox)!
Sig? - yeah, whatever.
Until that day arrives, Micro$oft continues to dominate the browser market and owns 90% of it. Hence, AOL, like any other commercial company, will back the de facto standard. Since 90% of the market is Internet Explorer, most web page designers will build their pages to be compatible with Internet Explorer (IE). AOL has an economic motivation to use IE technology as the basis of the new AOL browser.
Similar reasoning applies for office applications. Most programmers prefer to write office applications for Windows instead of MacOS because Windows dominates the market.
Apple missed the boat ... er ... luxury superliner on that "one".
You should read There must be a pony in here somewhere (reviewed by me on Slashdot) to find out AOL's real strategy. Netscape was not bought out for its software technologies.
Netscape was bought out so that the marketing department called up Microsoft and told Microsoft they wanted an AOL icon on each and every desktop with newly-shipped Windows. For like 2 or 3 years Microsoft did exactly that, which brought AOL who knows how many customers that paid for the service. Distributing Netscape-based browser to the AOL subscribers would have no financial benefits for AOL whatsoever.
A friend's mother recently bought a computer (which it was up to me to get working), and the thing came infested with AOL. Not only was there AOL links everywhere, and AIM running at startup, but the system manufacturer had set every instance of I.E. to an AOL branded Netscape browser. Going to program files -> Internet Explorer revealed, you guessed it, a app to sign up for AOL. The regular address bar in windows had been replaced by an AOL bar, which also fed everything through the AOLified Netscape (the normal address bar had been turned off by default and, once on, was shoved almost entirely off the side of the window).
It was a mess, quite frankly. Welcome to the future.
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