Wahoo! Finally, the news I've been waiting for since AOL bought Netscape. Mozillazine: "Newsforge, and others are reporting that the AOL client will use Gecko, starting with the next major release, 8.0. Along with that, the story talked about AOL's departure from any server platform that isn't linux, and AOL's plans to release a standalone linux client (there aren't any)."
Some of the best quotes from the NewsForge article: "AOL number-crunchers figure they can replace an $80,000 box running proprietary UNIX with two $5,000 Linux boxes and get a 50% increase in performance in addition to the cost savings. "Don't tell our competitors," one of our AOL contacts says. "Let them keep buying expensive crap." ... We hear that every hardware vendor who approaches AOL is now being asked, "How is your support for Linux?" before they are even allowed to make a sales presentation."
After testing out Gecko (the rendering engine inside Mozilla) on CompuServe for awhile, it turns out they got a lot of positive feedback. In fact, "so far, it sounds like member impact of an AOL switch from Explorer to Gecko will be almost entirely positive."
All AOL tech people we spoke to denied that corporate dislike of Microsoft played any part in their preference for either Linux or Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine. They said their choices were made purely on what worked best in tests they had run; that their concern was not corporate politics but to make life easier and smoother -- and downloads faster -- for AOL members.
On the browser front, once AOL switches to the Mozilla rendering engine, Netscape and Mozilla users -- and possibly Opera, Galeon and Konq users as well -- will no longer find themselves staring angrily at "Best viewed with Internet Explorer" or "You cannot access all features of this site unless you use Internet Explorer" tag lines -- except, possibly at MSN, which already requires Explorer and Windows Media Player to listen to music. This may be bad for Microsoft, but more Web sites following industry-wide standards is good for everyone else. Maybe the Web Standards Project will finally get some of the respect and cooperation it has deserved all along.
Just for completeness, here's the announcement at Slashdot too.
Monday, March 11, 2002
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