In case you didn't know or forgot, AOL has their own web browser. There's some buzz going around about it because it was formly in closed beta for AOL members only, but has now supposedly been released to the public. However, when I went to AOL's homepage, I couldn't find a link to download it from.

Any, as you may know, AOL owns Netscape. What may come to a surprise is that this browser they've released is based on Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Thanks to some sort of anti-trust thing, they can use the IE engine royalty free until 2010 (according to this eweek article). Why did they choose to use the IE engine instead of the Gecko engine, which is used in the Netscape and Firefox code? Perhaps AOL believes that when a big business decides to only support one of the two engines, they typically opt for IE, and AOL wants their users to experience as hassle free an Internet as possible.

The AOL browser isn't simply a reskinned version of IE, though. They've added features such as tabbed browsing and cookie and cached file management. Perhaps in a move to one-up Firefox, the AOL browser lets you drag and re-order your tabs and lets you see a thumbnail preview of webpages when you hover your mouse over the tabs or the "back" and "next" buttons. You can do a Google searc for screenshots. Admittedly, the AOL browser doesn't really look like IE at all.

You might notice from that screenshot that the address bar is below the tabs. At first, that seemed really confusing for me, but that's probably only because I'm used to using Firefox. Actually, it makes a lot more sense, because each tab represents a different page, and thus should have different addresses.

The AOL browser also supposedly has a "high contrast" mode for the vision impaired which sounds like it make be useful for my MediaPC which has a terrible video resolution (something like 320x240?). Right now I'm using Firefox with text size magnified 2 or 3 times, but that usually forces a horizontal scroll bar, which is also annoying.