AOL is still around. And it still fails.
(Speaking of fails, what is with Livejournal? I love how IE8 won't actually log me in right now and Firefox won't let me enter anything in Rich Text mode.) I <3 you guys too!!! X(
Anyway, so my company develops and supports a web portal product. Technically our customer host it on their own web servers but we provide tech support if they have any problems. I've spent the past 2 weeks trying to help one customer diagnosis login problems that mostly center around users who are on AOL.
I DIDN'T EVEN KNOW AOL WAS STILL AROUND! (Which I don't feel bad about at all anymore since a ton of people I've talked to at work didn't know it still existed either. Thank you Wikipedia for filling me in on the background info.) Why the h#ll are people still using that thing? And they are on version 9.1 or higher so it's not like they're using old as dirt computer that hasn't been updated in 10 years. To add insult to injury, I had to download the stupid thing and install it so I could try to reproduce the problem. I'm somewhat worried that the Virtual Machine I installed it on is going to chew up so much memory it's going to set my whole computer on fire. The thing is a MEMORY HOG, and that's putting it nicely. I keep thinking my VM crashed but it's just AOL slowness.
After making my very own fake AOL login I was able to login to the thing and start testing (just for the record I haven't been able to reproduce the "AOL login issue" that my customer is reporting). The more I use the thing the more I don't understand how it makes browsing "easy" or in any way better. I suppose if it's all you've ever used you wouldn't know any better, but seriously, it's painfully hard to find any of the settings or change them.
The whole "browser" (if you can even call it that, since it's basically a pretty interface built on top of Internet Explorer) is like one big AOL propaganda channel. No I don't need you to suggest shopping or news for me. I know what sites to go to if I want that information. Now please give me the "real" settings page and stop hiding it behind a bunch of AOL FAQs that BTW don't include information on all the settings. I even put it in what I call "AOL Dummy mode" which is where AOL picks all my security and privacy settings for me, since I figured maybe that was why they were having login problems (nope, I could still login). When you do that it does this SUPER ANNOYING thing where it highlights all the menus and takes away control from you. But it doesn't indicate which menus you can't really access anymore, instead it's a fun guessing game of "humm, if I click on this menu will I actually get to do something, or will it take me to the glorious FAQ page again?"
Seriously people. If you are still using AOL, it's time to think for yourself and use a real browser for a change. It's not like you're going to be safer from any worms or viruses since it's running on the IE source code anyway.