AOL Explorer

» see explorer.aol.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

aol explorer was free, ran on any windows machine and would have installed fine on mine. what kept it out of turkey was not licensing or language. it was the two letters at the front. aol was a us dial-up company, and in ankara that name meant nothing you could act on, so a browser wearing it read as somebody else's software before you had even started the download.

what i actually used in that window was internet explorer 6 and then firefox. if you wanted tabs before firefox made them normal you installed an ie shell, and the shells people actually installed were maxthon and the myie2 it had grown out of. aol explorer was the same class of program with a different sticker on it.

it arrived in july 2005, first under the name aol browser and then renamed. you could download it on its own or take it bundled with aim. it had tabs and a pop-up blocker. it also shipped a spyware scanner, and it rendered pages with trident, which is to say with internet explorer.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

pc magazine liked it. the review praised its wealth of features and its visual design, then spent the rest of the space on the questionable anti-spyware tools and the fact that third-party toolbars would not load. version 1.5 arrived in may 2006. it added desktop widgets, meaning the side panels could be pulled out and used on their own. it also turned rss feeds into a screensaver, which is the most 2006 sentence in this whole file.

the trident part was not a shortcut, it was a legal asset. on 29 may 2003 microsoft settled aol's antitrust suit for seven hundred and fifty million dollars, and part of that settlement handed aol a royalty-free seven-year license to use internet explorer technology in its client. aol explorer was that license being spent.

~ the funny part ~

aol had bought netscape in a stock deal that closed in march 1999. netscape is the company whose browser microsoft spent the late nineties destroying, and the suit that produced the settlement was filed on netscape's behalf in january 2002. so the compensation aol won for netscape being killed by internet explorer was, among other things, permission to use internet explorer.

then it shipped two browsers in the same year on two engines it did not own. netscape browser 8.0 came out on 19 may 2005, published by aol but built by an outside shop called mercurial communications, running gecko with a switch that flipped pages over to trident. aol explorer followed in july, trident only. the mozilla foundation that aol had spun out and funded in july 2003 supplied one engine, and the company aol had just sued supplied the other.

~ what it became ~

aol openride launched on 4 october 2006 and took its place. openride put instant messaging and a browser in one window that split into panels, with a media player sitting in the same frame. it was pulled from the download page in late may 2007, under eight months old. in late july 2007 aol announced the replacement, codenamed helix, which shipped as aol desktop.

that is three client rewrites in roughly two years, each one carrying most of the previous one's features across and none of them lasting long enough to be missed. aol explorer is the middle one. it gets remembered, when it gets remembered at all, for the engine it borrowed rather than for anything it did with it.

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