InsideMicrosoft

AOL Explorer: The AOL Web Browser Reviewed

For months, I eagerly anticipated the AOL Browser. Keeping in mind this was well before Microsoft announced Internet Explorer 7, the AOL Browser was my last best hope for an Internet Explorer based browser that could hold a candle to Firefox. With tabbed browsing and other advanced features, I was pretty excited.

When AOL delivered the first beta, it didn’t work for me, and after a few days of dealing with their horrendous tech support people, I gave up. This past week, AOL began bundling a new version of the browser with the latest beta of AOL Instant Messenger. This new version even had an RSS reader. I downloaded it, and lo and behold it worked.

So, did it live up to me expectations?

Absolutely. And I couldn’t be more dissapointed.

AOL Explorer, as it has been renamed, has a great interface. It is slick and cool, making it easily the best-looking browser I’ve ever seen. The pieces are great. I’m not a fan of tabbed browsing, but the implementations in this browser made it easier to deal with. AOL has made things easier by including thumbnail previews everywhere.

Hover over a tab, see a preview of the page:

Select anything in the address bar, see a preview of the page:

Go to the back (or forward) button, see a preview of the page:

And the favorites menu has the thumbnails as well. You can setup a startup folder in the favorites so that every time you load the browser, those sites are open in seperate tabs (very convenient for blogging). Type certain things in the address bar, and the browser does some interest things, like automatically run searches and return stock quotes, right in the address bar:

There are several side panels. The search panel doesn’t seem to work, and the desktop search crashed the browser (Coolz0r reported some major problems with this as well). For some stupid reason, there’s no Instant Messenger side panel (a major mistake). The feed reader side panel is pretty good, with all the feeds expandable and an easy way to see what’s been updated. Hovering over the post title gets you the excerpt, and clicking opens the page in a new tab (all pretty basic stuff). I couldn’t make it my permanent RSS reader, since it didn’t let me organize feeds into folders or reorder the list, a usability nightmare with well over a hundred feeds. Whenever you are on a website with a feed, an RSS button appears next to the address bar.

The menu has a bunch of power-browsing tools, including WhoIS lookups for any page, plus fun stuff like flipping the page in several directions and viewing everything backwards. The view menu was surprisingly grayed out, making any customizations of the browser’s look nearly impossible.

Now, a lot of this stuff is available in Firefox. Almost everything else is available through the use of plugins. Right out of the download, AOL Explorer has all of this, with everything better integrated than Firefox could ever have. To get your Firefox working like AOL Explorer, you’d need to wade through a mess of plugins. For the typical user, this makes AOL Explorer more useful and much, much easier than Firefox. And it goes without saying that AOL Explorer makes Internet Explorer look like a chump.

So, what’s the problem?

In a word, the program sucks. While being quite possibly, purely on features and interface, the best web browser I have ever laid my eyes on, the actual program blows major chunks. It eats up anywhere from forty to eighty megabytes of RAM, killing every program on my system. It runs so clunky as to be just embaressing. I love the features, but I’m not waiting 30-90 seconds for every time I try to look at the browser. It just stalls and stalls and stalls and stalls.

I’ve been using AOL Explorer for two days for all my blogging and browsing needs, which are a lot. I’m done. Until the next version of the browser, I will not launch it again. It is far too slow. It kills my productivity, it infuriates me, it drives me nuts.

And the worst part is, I love it. Its a great program. Fix the memory hogging and poor performance, and I’ll switch to it and tell the whole internet how great it is. But running like this? Its impossible. I don’t have the patience for it.

So, if someone can get this message to AOL: Your company is in trouble. You have not had a successful product launch in a decade, if not more. The only product of yours anyone uses is Instant Messenger, and people are finding ways to avoid it. This program is great. It is probably the best featured product I’ve ever seen from your company. You need to fix the performance problems, or no one will ever use it. As is, it is the most dissapointing embaressment ever; a program that is great, but no one can use.

Fix it, before everyone abandons your company forever.

Oh, and I’ve got bad news. If you don’t fix it before Internet Explorer 7 shows up, no one will care.

Please fix it. I really, really like it.

May 9th, 2005 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Internet Explorer, Applications, General | 8 comments