Are you sure the AOL browser is a "stand-alone" software? Or is it just some kind of frontend/skin? The problem is that you won't get an answer by the users because they belong to the people who don't know what they're using anyway.

Edited by Tapuak at 16:09 on June, 10th 2003

I think older versions of AOL are actually Internet Explorer and newer ones are Mozilla. So it's not possible to put them into just one category. Just like Netscape: Older ones are their own branch, newer ones are Mozilla.

AOL browsers work off the IE engine (meaning that just like the MSN explorer browser as well as neoplanet, crazy browser, etc, aol is just an IE frontend).

As far as aohell switching to nutscrape browsers, I was under the impression that they had already done that with their newset version, but that first aol one I posted had v8.0 (the newset version), but was running off of IE5.0. Most likely, it won't be until aol 9.0 that they switch to nutscrape.

As for "Micro$hit Internet Exploder" and all its 'frontends', they all suck. Seriously though: could we stop this childish namechanging? It's not very mature.

It's the way I think of these products/companies. I never think of nutscrape as "netscape", nor do I ever think of "M$" as MS nor "micorsoft". Sometimes I think of aol as "aol" and sometimes I think of it as "aohell". How I post the name depends on how I'm thinking of it when I post. I don't refer to you as "joe smith" because I don't think of you as "joe smith", likewise I don't use the real names of these products/companies for the simple fact that I don't think of them by their real names.

Right. I'll call you Rumpletweezer from now on then. In case you don't like that, keep in mind that it was you who introduced me to this "I call things the way I think about them" - concept. Oh, and you should keep in mind that without Netscape, we wouldn't be talking here now. In fact, I doubt I'd even have an Internet connection if it wasn't for Netscape!

If you knew someone named bob, had always called him bob, but someone told you one day to call him robert, would you?

As far as nutscrape goes, it may have contributed to the internet in the past, but it is not a very good browser (at least not anymore, although I don't know how it stacked up against the competition back in the v3~v4 days). And lets not waste time with the moz=nutscrape argument. They both have the same roots, but they have gone in different directions since then. And while nutscrape 7 is based on moz 1.x, nutscrape added a lot of branding and bloat, and removed or hid several features.

Netscape didn't contribute to the Internet, it was the Internet! Netscape was what made the Internet popular. There was no competition then!

You're missing one important point, Rumpletweezer: Netscape is financing the Mozilla development and most of the programmers are former Netscape employees. Without Netscape, there wouldn't be Mozilla (of course, since Mozilla is only the continuation of Netscape Communicator) and without it, Mozilla wouldn't have continued after Milestone 3 or something. There are no 'different directions' - Netscape just changed the business model of its browser (proprieter to open source) and called it by its original codename again.