I like the OpenOffice suggestion, but would they want to support it?

They just just zip it, put a nice "we don't support this" disclaimer, and then let word get round that there's a free version of "office" with every AOL disk...

This would be truly a declaration of war :)

AOL couldn't care less about "hurting" MSFT. Like *any* company, they care about their own business and making money. If they bundle OpenOffice.org, it's not because AOL executives wrote emails to eachother plotting some "big war against M$" but because it's free and it's an added value for their customers and thus, more incentive for customers to switch to AOL and thus, more money for AOL. If you believe AOL, IBM, Sun Microsystems, Apple or Oracle are really interested in fighting Microsoft because of the good of humanity and geeks, you're mistaken badly.

How would that make sense?

Rather than embedding the rendering engine into the AOL client, they should embed a separate program which has the rendering engine embedded within it. Mnnn-kay. I guess that would make sense to *AOL*... just not me :)

Wow, that is new. (I might add it seems to run quite sluggish on RC1.) Though it would be surprising to me if Netscape/AOL decided to use a different skin at this stage, what with all the refinements and testing done on this skin.

Eww that looks like old netscape 6.0 PR1 color scheme. Ewww

If I had to hazard a guess, I would say that they're looking to create a new skin for Netscape 6.5. This is based upon the following:

- Netscape.com has typically mirrored the look of the Netscape skin for Mozilla (which so far has been the Mozilla "Modern" skin. - Differentiating themselves from Mozilla by using a noticably different skin is probably to their (marketing) advantage. - Differentiating Netscape 6.5 from 6.0-6.2.x (via a different look) is also probably to their advantage, due to the leaps and bounds Mozilla has taken between 0.9.4 and 1.0.

However, I have no inside information, and my guess is based only upon these points.

"I wonder why mozilla had to find out about mozilla being placed in aol mac from cnet?"

First of all, MozillaZine is not (officially) affiliated with mozilla.org. I'm not sure if any mozilla.org people knew about this but if any did then they probably would have had to sign non-disclosure agreements.

> Doesnt AOL or netscape have a press release.

No, there's nothing so far. AOL probably don't want to make a big deal about this because it's only a beta and they may change their plans (though I personally think this is unlikely).

By the sounds of the CNET article, CNET got hold of the note sent to beta testers (one of the testers probably leaked it to them) and wrote an article based on that. It would have been unscrupulous to put news of the beta on MozillaZine without citing the source. Also, linking to the article gives people extra details and background information.

MozillaZine doesn't have a huge team of reporters to research articles and sniff out information. It's just a handful of people who run the site in their spare time. All the news is either stumbled upon or submitted by readers (you can use the submission form http://www.mozillazine.org/submit/ to send in anything that you think is tasty). Therefore, using secondary sources is often unavoidable (and conversely, it can actually be beneficial).

I hope this explains the situation.

Alex

The current AOL 7.0 software uses IE. However, AOL are also testing a version of 7.0 that uses Gecko instead. The only people using Gecko in AOL 7.0 are those that have signed up for the beta programme.

Alex