Re: AOL

At 12:23 p.m. 12/30/98 -0600, Charles F. Munat wrote:
>I am trying to test my pages on as many browsers as possible. 

Yay!  I have about a half dozen I use, not counting various versions of
the same thing.

>I went to
>aol.com and downloaded the latest browser, [...]
>Interestingly, I tested the browser on local files and it seems to be using
>MSIE to do it's Internet browsing.

The problem here is that at various times, AOL uses different software.
I believe now they _do_ use IE (or a co-branded IE) as their web
browser software.  However, they didn't always, and so if someone joined
AOL years ago and hasn't taken the time to download a new browser 
from AOL, they may be stuck with the AOL home-grown browser.  Which is
generally pretty crappy. :)

>Kynn, you seem to be an expert on browsers. What say you?

Yikes, now I _have_ to look authoritative. :)

>I currently have the following:

>MSIE 5.0 beta2, Netscape 4.5, 4.07, 4.05, 3.4, 3.1, 2.02, Mosaic 3.0,
>Lynx 2.8, pwWebspeak 2.0, Opera 3.5, WebTV viewer, AOL 4.0???

This is pretty much what I have; an older version of Lynx would be good,
and also, go hunting for some of the really freaky browser versions from
third-string or fourth-string companies.  Stuff like Amaya (okay, maybe
the W3C shouldn't fairly be called "third string"), or Arache (for DOS).

If you have an HP printer, get the HP web page formatter program, that
functions as a browser to download and pretty-print web pages.

Oh, also download the test for Gecko from http://developer.netscape.com/

BrowserWatch has a list of Windows browsers (some links are dead):
http://browserwatch.internet.com/browsers/browsers-win.html

>Also, any ideas for how to get around Bill Gates' dictum that thou shalt
>only have one copy of IE on your system? Short of a dual boot, that is.

I've seen how to make IE4 and IE5 co-exist, but I can't really remember
how.  I just run IE4 on my laptop and Sun machine, and IE5 on the Win95
desktop machine, sorry.

As for AOL, I'm assuming you know that Bobby has an option for various
versions of AOL's homegrown browser; naturally, though, it's not as good
as seeing the real thing.  A somewhat amusing, but generally unhelpful,
web page is at http://powered.cs.yale.edu:8000/~miller/aol/aol.html
Slightly more helpful is http://home.daytaco.com/aolhelp/ which at least
tells you what AOL's browser won't do.  A user-oriented page is at
http://www.designbuildresource.com/SantaFe/home/aolpage.html

I'm hunting around, but I can't seem to find the AOL browser separately
anywhere as a downloadable executable; I think it's embedded into the
core system of AOL.

Sorry I couldn't be much more help.

--
Kynn Bartlett  <kynn@idyllmtn.com>                   http://www.kynn.com/
Chief Technologist, Idyll Mountain Internet      http://www.idyllmtn.com/
Design an accessible web site:                http://www.kynn.com/+fedweb
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Enroll now for my online CSS course!             http://www.kynn.com/+css

Received on Wednesday, 30 December 1998 14:16:21 UTC