Call Me Al

The Microsoft/AOL settlement makes me wonder about the future of Gecko based products. Will AOL continue to embed Internet Explorer for many years to come, or do they just want the right to do so as they work in the background on switching to Gecko? If they really wanted to, AOL could just surrender and shut Netscape down. That would dissappoint a lot of people. Though quite a few of the features in Mozilla such as tabbed browsing and pop-up blocking aren't unique, I've found the interface favorable. Fiddling with the UI via user.js, userChrome and userContent have given me quite a bit of control of the way my browser looks and behaves.

I've been surfing without ads cluttering my screen for quite a while. I have yet to run into a "false positive" and when I do run into an advertisement, it is usually not very obtrusive. I very rarely click on banner ads. I ignore most tv ads except those for a nice juicy burger.

I'm not saying that AOL didn't benefit from this deal. A nice chunk of money and and big push to get AOL onto future desktops are helpful. Microsoft is definitely saying "we abused our monopoly." That's not to say I'm a huge fan of the AOL Time Warner conglomerate. AOL sucks ;-). But they have accumulated some quality products such as Netscape and Winamp. Microsoft clearly benefitted from this deal as well.

I plan to continue to use Firebird until something better comes along. The only bug that currently annoys me is that I can't use [backspace] to navigate back and that just had a patch checked in. Mozilla has come a long way from when I first started using it. They've also made great strides from what Netscape 4 was.