umbraroze comments on AOL will end dial-up internet service in September, 34 years after it's debut — AOL Shield Browser and AOL Dialer software will be shuttered on the same day

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[–] umbraroze@slrpnk.net 16 points 1 year ago (3 children)

AOL Shield Browser is some absolute Wack Crap.

Remember how AOL bought Netscape and open-sourced it, leading to the Mozilla project?

AOL Shield Browser is based on Chromium.

...I get it, Chromium is easier to use for developing custom browsers than Gecko. But, still... why?

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[–] Psythik@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago* (2 children)

I actually had no idea that Firefox only exists because of AOL (The Mozilla Browser evolved into Firefox for those not in the know). Thanks for sharing that interesting bit of history.

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[–] frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone 17 points 1 year ago

They actually didn't; the timeline is off. Mozilla was spun off as an open source version of Netscape Navigator in January 1998. Netscape was acquired by AOL in November.

Jamie Zawinski, who had been a major proponent of open sourcing it within Netscape, was a critic of the merger.

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[–] db2@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

To be pedantic there really wasn't a standalone browser, it was the Netscape (later Mozilla) suite which was browser email WYSIWYG HTML editor and an irc client. Firefox, then called Firebird, was them fully decoupling it from the suite.

Also that's why the email client is called Thunderbird, it was meant to be a separate but complimentary program to Firebird.

The pedantic part is that it wasn't an evolution. The suite never died, it's still around. They have a shared Netscape/Mozilla Suite ancestor. It's called SeaMonkey.

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