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AOL is not looking at Mozilla 1.0 though. They are looking at a browser from their Netscape division called Netscape v7.0. Both of these products are from a common base but are being developed independently, I believe.
IE will continue to lose marketshare. The repeated discoveries of security weaknesses (and breaches!) combined with IE's "low-man on the pole" CSS/Web Standard support, will work against it.
IE6 is already getting a little "long in the tooth..." I would not be surprised to hear of an IE 6.5 or 7.0 beta before too much longer. M$ simply HAS to respond to the features and compliance offered by Opera, Mozilla/Netscape. They have no choice.
Most of the browers installed by developers are IE with other browers only installed for checking compatibility.
Now why should I believe that people are going to pay money to get something that does the same thing as the free IE?
Netscape's browser is free too. Only AOL has the user base to push another browser, but AOL is in financial trouble. The AOL/Time Warner merger has already led to the biggest write off in history (52 Billion Dollars).
How would AOL gain by changing its browser to NS 7? (I mean beyond the law suit to get damages from Microsoft.) Isn't this just positioning in support of this suit?
A change of browsers from one free browser to another free browser that has no significant advantages for the average user, is fraught with disaster. At the end of the change over 33 million users will be no better off than before. But how many of these users will have problems? How many will leave? How much will it cost to mend the fences caused for this no-adantage-to-the-user move?
With NS/Mozilla they have access to the source code... which equals complete flexability..
Also if M$ does implement smart tags in future versions of IE... AOL won't be forced to hijack traffic from there own properties to send to M$ properties
(besides M$ stopped adding the shorcut to AOL in windows... I think AOL would be foolish not to do the same to M$)
"At the end of the change over 33 million users will be no better off than before"
They'll probably end up with much better security
IE is standards compliant and NS, Mozilla and Opera are doing a good job of catch up. I think Mozilla is the best of the three, NS 7 beta has some real rendering problems withy tables that are so gross that they are almost 100% sure to be fixed before the v7 goes live. Opera, does not yet fully support the w3c DOM but they will get there.
But at the end of the day, all they have done is caught up.
btw, i noticed that after msie now also mozilla and netscape
implemented oncontextmenu="return false;" which is not w3c valid...
i thought mozilla would care more about the w3c standarts?
Here are some links to mull over regarding WAI compliance.
[w3.org...]
[w3.org...]
[w3.org...] (moz 0.9.9)