Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: AOL Acquires Netscape

Author:Steven Shmerler
Posted:11/24/1998; 2:19:17 PM
Topic:AOL Acquires Netscape
Msg #:478 (In response to 450)
Prev/Next:477 / 479

As a web developer, my concern is with AOL's perception of the Internet and browsers. Their culture is intra vs. inter and who among us hasn't been sincerely hampered by AOL's consistant heel dragging with supplying their customers the latest browserware?

And how about their position on the Mac? I assume most of you know that AOL 3.0 for Windows included MSIE 3.0, whereas AOL 3.0 for Mac only used MSIE 2.0.

Does their purchase of NS mean AOL is buying in the tech and culture needed to provide top flight browsers? If so, then why would they continue packaging MSIE and not convert over, or incude both? Perhaps it's their contract with MS, I'm not up on that.

Also, since AOL always bundles the browser internally, I sure hope that NS will be available as a stand-alone, which seems odd since, many of us access the web from their competitor ISPs.

Lots to consider. Given AOLs consistant slowness and lack of support for the web developer community, I'm leary. Very leary...

Steven

There are responses to this message:

This page was archived on 6/13/2001; 4:45:57 PM.

© Copyright 1998-2001 UserLand Software, Inc.