AOL Browser

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I hear AOL is developing a browser based on IE, with “extra features” for “Power Browsing”. Let’s see how it compares to Firefox:

  • tabbed browsing – Check
  • “tear-off tabs” – OK, not yet.
  • a “clear my footprints” feature – Check (in Options, or via an extension)
  • pop-up blocker – Check
  • display thumbnail images of pages as users hover over the back and forward buttons – no, but sounds like a UI nightmare
  • zoom in and out on a page – Check (although an extension improves matters)
  • force a Web page to display in high-contrast for the vision-impaired – Check (Stylesheet Switcher)
  • highlight or list links on a page – Check (Page Info has a list)
  • frequent security problems – Er… no.

14 thoughts on “AOL Browser”

  2. “display thumbnail images of pages as users hover over the back and forward buttons” sounds really useful… I regularly end up with a menu on the back button containing the same words as the site has a brain dead “title” field…

  3. force a Web page to display in high-contrast for the vision-impaired – Check (Stylesheet Switcher)

    UNCHECK!!

    FireFox cannot display the page in high-contrast WITHOUT altering the layout. Selecting no-style removes all other styles as well, and may ruin the layout.

    Selecting another developer provided high-contrast style is not the answer, AOL has the option to FORCE! high-contrast.

  4. Displaying the page in high-contrast is easy with the Web Developer extension. Just ‘Disable Page Colors’ and the page reloads a stark page with all colours stripped.

  5. Ross, You are correct,but…

    1) AOl browser does it out of the box, Firefox has no apparent way. so it is still an Uncheck.

    2) The Web-developer extension is not good for accesability. Yes it removes most colors, but the colors for link and visited links are not high contrast and therefor not that helpful.

    2) Many people would not look toward or search for this feature in a *developer* extension. Why is there no accesability category of extensions ? thats where people will look for them.

  6. Henrik:
    1) AOL browser does a lot of other things out of the box, which IE includes out of the box, which noone NEEDS out of the box. Firefox is pretty much bloat-free.

    2) You did two twice.

    2) If you want to make an extension which does this, there is all sorts of information on mozdev.org. Please check it out. It would be included in a new Accessibility section, I’m quite sure.

  7. Henrik has two good points :-)

    The first is that Firefox can’t currently do “high contrast and layout” without an extension. Fair enough.

    The second is that it would be great to have Accessibility extensions (or even just one which had all the useful stuff in it) and/or a category on update.mozilla.org.

  8. What a disaster, with AOL being such a big company, and users non knowing that AOL Browser is essentially identical to IE, with all the security holes, yet having some nice features, it will only get harder to develop standards compliant sites. AOL has always sucked, but the average user doesn’t know that, so this is major problem for the future of the web. IE has held back the development of the web long enough, without it’s engine creeping in to even more products.

  9. > FireFox cannot display the page in high-contrast
    > WITHOUT altering the layout.
    Actually this can even be done without an extension.

    1. Go into Tools -> Options -> Fonts & Colors
    2. Set your desired colors
    3. Check Always use my [x] colors

    Also, the trunk version of Firefox is even better. If you’re running in Windows high contrast mode (Left-Alt + Left-Shift + Printscreen), it will automatically choose the right settings for you (including use system colors).

  10. Zoom in Firefox sucks.

    First, you need the text zoom extension (why don’t zoom changes stay resident by defaul,t who knws). The Tools->Fonts method breaks layouts more often than not.

    Secondly, see Opera’s zoom for another reason why FF’s zoom sucks ;)

  11. BTW clear my footprints, Safari in OSX 10.4 will best this by default: it has a “Clear my tracks” from this point on” so that empty history file doesn’t look so suspicious!!

  13. gman,

    the ff doesn’t have zoom. it’s just text resizing;
    and yes – opera does have real zooming that zooms also pictures.