(2002-03-11) e

AOL to switch to Mozilla, or at least its Gecko rendering engine, for version8. A browser shift by AOL is going to leave an awful lot of companies that assume their Web sites only need to work with Explorer scrambling to rewrite their code so that they don't lose AOL's 30 million-plus subscribers, or about 30% of all U.S. Internet users... "With Gecko, we have control over the client software and don't have to worry about Microsoft screwing up our Streaming (Audio and Video)," says one AOL sysadmin. There is also concern at AOL about Explorer's "poor use" of the HTTP 1.1 Protocol. Our AOL sysadmin says, "HTTP 1.1 has lots more features than most people use," but AOL can make good use of many lesser-known ones like chunking, that are not supported by Explorer because, says our AOL sysadmin friend, "MsIE doesn't follow the spec correctly."