rakaz

about standards, webdesign, usability and open source

Could it be any uglier?

Tuesday, 30 November 2004

What were they thinking… Seriously, is it possible to create a more confusing and cluttered interface. Compared to Firefox, on which this beast is based, this is simply horrific. I never thought much of AOL. Today, this has once again been confirmed in a big, big way.

20041130-netscape

22 Responses to “Could it be any uglier?”

  1. keff wrote on November 30th, 2004 at 11:31 pm

    Geez, who the f*** designed that search button in the middle – and whole other lot of ugly things? Well, at least it is AOL navigator, not AOL explorer, but still is the good cadidate for ‘the ugliest browser of the internet’ :))

  2. frank wrote on December 1st, 2004 at 1:41 am

    Ugh!

  3. Aaron wrote on December 1st, 2004 at 4:38 am

    I am going to try it for myself. It looks horrible! lol

  4. Bernie Zimmermann wrote on December 1st, 2004 at 8:40 am

    I’m with you on this one, but then again I’m probably the most fervent anti-Netscape guy around. Why…won’t…Netscape…just…die!?

  5. Avangelon wrote on December 1st, 2004 at 9:10 am

    Come on guys, it’s not THAT bad! Just poof the bubbles and replace it with maybe a darker, or even the same shade of green on the tabs. I think that’d look good then :). Oh yeah, kill the useless buttons and sidebar, they are teh ew. Or something like that ;). Ok, so maybe the people in charge of the decision on whether or not a particular feature is useless or not should be shot, but hey, I see a shiny gleem of hope…..maybe? ^^

  6. Rob Mientjes wrote on December 1st, 2004 at 3:54 pm

    For the sake of IE next to Gecko rendering, I’d use it. But I’d toss in the Firefox XUL as well :P Oh, the blessings of XML…

  7. Rob Mientjes wrote on December 1st, 2004 at 3:55 pm

    Doh! What was I thinking? Gravatars rule!

  8. Charl van Niekerk wrote on December 1st, 2004 at 5:07 pm

    Uglyness is a Netscape legacy…

  9. Stanley Turnteen wrote on December 1st, 2004 at 6:06 pm

    /me vomits

  10. zcorpan wrote on December 1st, 2004 at 6:39 pm

    Reminds me about when I first tried out Opera. Although, it was easily fixed through disabling the theme and get rid of all useless sidebars and toolbars.

  11. James wrote on December 2nd, 2004 at 12:49 am

    By far the ugliest, I used it for like 20 min. and decided that there was no point in using this instead of Firefox. Their bigest flaw is that they have no idea what they are intending to do with the interface, they are trying to make everybody happy but they just cluttered it up way to much. If they focused on just the newbies or expert users they could do better, but they just can’t get it right.

  12. Ed wrote on December 2nd, 2004 at 2:13 am

    To be honest, i actually expected worse from AOL, this is an improvement from their current AOL interface. Perhaps the next version they will get closer to something a little more user friendly.

  13. Adrian wrote on December 2nd, 2004 at 3:56 am

    …And the menu bar on the right-hand side of the screen!

  14. chris wrote on December 2nd, 2004 at 10:48 pm

    I wanted to give it a try, now I’m too scared.

  15. Scott wrote on December 5th, 2004 at 7:22 am

    the only good thing about it is the integrated IE…. if that can be called a good thing.
    IE should be executed

  16. smallT wrote on December 6th, 2004 at 3:15 am

    And think…someone got paid for that design!

  17. Rob McMichael wrote on December 7th, 2004 at 7:59 pm

    Man that is nasty, but at the end of the day the more people that use it the easier our jobs become ;)

  18. Zdenek wrote on December 12th, 2004 at 7:08 pm

    No, although I’m using a skin with small buttons for maximizing the viewable area, this isn’t too bad. And the only bad thing on this page is that everyone repeats what the author said to worm into his favor.

  19. Mathias Bynens wrote on December 22nd, 2004 at 5:11 pm

    Hehe, pretty bad, that is.

  20. Barna wrote on January 10th, 2005 at 8:29 pm

    Have any of you noticed the security risk of integrating IE into Netscape? They didn’t simply make an uglier Firefox but put a security hole in it! The IE emulator is a simple extension, and ANY website can start it (read it at a mozdev article), so this browser has all the security holes of IE.

  21. Joseph Benjamin Wilkinson wrote on July 8th, 2005 at 11:07 pm

    I have to agree. However, compared to Netscape 8, this is pretty as can be.

  22. bob wrote on October 5th, 2005 at 5:03 pm

    i might not mind it if i could move the buttons into a better layout because this one is s**t

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