Aol tag

In the dramatic season finale, the folks at Netscape Blog have announced that Netscape is no longer supported.

If anything, it is about time. This browser has been long dead since Netscape 6 tried to revive it. It is so full of crap, bloatware, and AOL that it made it an unfriendly out-of-the-box experience. Internet Explorer was the better browser at that time.

If you read the blogs at Mozilla, you’d be told of how AOL tried to break the Mozilla-browser in many ways just to please themselves that it is just as well they said “screw you” and forked Firefox.

Asa Dotzler gives a bit of an insight,

They drained every penny they could out of the browser until finally giving up in 2003 and closing down browser development at Netscape. Future versions were outsourced efforts built on Mozilla and Microsoft technologies and offering pretty awful user experiences and even further tie-ins to AOL and AOL partner services. Combine that with Netscape and AOL web services tanking and you’ve got a pretty clear death spiral.

So no more are we going to see awful attempts by AOL to create a web browser to drive themselves forward.

A couple of days ago, AOL released search data upon the world. Not just any random old search data, but data by 650,000 AOL users, each with their searches “anonymized” by putting a number next to them (as in, you can still identify the user, just not which user). It a somewhat strange “slip up” by AOL (they later retracted the data and said it was a mistake to release) it revealed search queries over three months.

Some of the more interesting have been thrown into a flash animation.

The problem is with their apparent “anonymizing.” It doesn’t really do a fat load of good. The New York Times was able to track down one of these people who made this list. Her search terms were all read out to her, and she confirmed they were hers. You could still basically track what these people were doing over these three months, a “snap shot” of their lives if you will.

But, that said, would releasing the data without any identifier at all made the situation any less worse? Probably not.

It is going to be some time before AOL is trusted again by many. Of course, from the sounds of it, not many did in the first place!

• More searches, this time from someone scary (though can’t top that killer).

Despite AOL taking it off their servers, it doesn’t prevent people already with the data from spreading it. There are many numerous servers and torrents to download this data from.