SCARECROW -
no offense taken.
I agree - it is a huge market to be left in the dark... but if we can't get it to work on aol's browser stuff (it's been a while since I've seen it on the mac... do they now use ie or ns for their browser, or is it still that weird pseudo-browser they had around say version 5?) we simply note on the page a link to some instruction as to how to use ie/netscape with your aol connection.
But I feel vastly different about the browser wars stuff... (this will probably get me flamed, but oh well)... I agree that microsoft needs competition, as does any market.. but as a web developer... I'd welcome a monopoly in this case. I only use ie on my mac. I am as anit-m$ as the next guy, but it's truly a great browser, never gives me trouble.. and to me looks and acts better than even it's pc counterpart. In fact.. even the office suite looks/acts nicer on the mac than it does on the pc!
I honestly can't say the same for netscape. The best experience I've had with mozilla was with chimera. Great product -- all the goodness of the mozilla engine without all the bloat of say ns6. Netscape 6+ has so much extra garbage I don't use that it's truly unuseable on my aging powerbook.
I agree also that standards are what we need. The biggest problem I face is the time it takes to test on so many different options! Or when something that works great in ie on all platforms.. decides to break on netscape... my latest example would be loading php content in flash. Flash rocks. It has the capabilty to truly change the face of the internet, and the power to bring some real interactivity to the scene.
So back to my php/netscape point:
In netscape... when loading data into flash from php(netscape 4- I think) there is an issue where if the server(apache) is using the gzip mod.. (sends compressed data to the browser) netscape will request that the data be sent compressed... but netscape or the flash player offers no way of decompressing it. I don't honestly know if this is an issue with the browser or the flash player.. but at any rate.. ie either ignores it or knows the player can't handle it and therefore doesn't request compressed data.
Before we get onto the flash discussion -- I'd like to point out that the days of flash animation for the sake of animation are over (I HOPE!) and that this idea of loading dynamic content into a flash frontend is a true godsend.. Almost(!) true cross platformabilty without caring what browser your users are using. I like that -- now if we could get macromedia to iron out some of these little things.. I wouldn't care if my users were using aol1.0 as long as it had support for flash.
And before I go -- just a fun example of interactive flash that I've been working on the past few days:
http://psychlonex.dyndns.org/magnets/
J5