Is it worth testing sites in AOL anymore?

[MrSpeed]

Back in the day I used to test web sites in AOL since their browser was somewhat proprietary. Once they started to use IE as the render engine there still were some subtle differences. For example in AOL you could not create a pop-up and write to it from the parent.

Does anyone still test sites in AOL?

[JAB Creations]

Simple; check the useragent.

"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; AOL 9.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)"

Looks like AOL = MSIE. You are able to test with MSIE?

Ok, straight talk now! AOL has always used IE with one exception, it's MAC edition (which from my knowledge stopped at version 7.0).

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20020730 AOL/7.0

Use Netscape 6 to test in place of AOL 7.0 for Mac.

Older versions of AOL (not sure how far back, I think up to 4.0 maybe) have IE embeded in them. Newer versions just find IE and use whatever version of IE you're running.

So the simple answer is and pretty much always has been: no.

John

[MrSpeed]

Newer versions just find IE and use whatever version of IE you're running.

Is this true? It uses IE as though you had opened it yourself? It doesn't try to load all konds of crazy ads and AOL content?

[JAB Creations]

Let me help clarify it with a simple analogy.

Firefox, SeaMonkey, Camino, and Netscape all use the Gecko rendering engine. Get the latest version of any of them and in the useragent you will see "rv:1.8" which means Gecko 1.8.

So when you open up AOL...yes all the aol junk is there and unless AOL overrides something (which is usually won't from what I remember about three or so years back) it doesn't; you will get both AOL and IE's ...stuff.

So...just test with IE, simple as that.

John