They had an agreement whereby AOL got one of those "Sign up for AOL!" icons on the desktop, in exchange for using IE as their browser. Evidently, it was up for renewal last June, and talks "broke down" (news item)...which no doubt explains why AOL 7.0 is based on Mozilla (still not a Netscape browser, really; what Netscape calls "Navigator 6" is just open-source Mozilla repackaged). Mozilla's been something of a disappointment, but it's still lightyears better than the Nag 4.x series, notably in the area of conforming to international technical standards. Sure makes my life easier as a Web designer to be able to design for a standard browser. IE's complied with the standards (about 90%) since 5.0, so it's ironic that the "monopolist" is a "good citizen", while Netscape, with all its blather about "open standards", has essentially been the outlaw all these years.

--Robert