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ETpro's avatar

Is AOL Explorer counted as Microsoft Internet Explorer in typical browser usage statistics?

Asked by ETpro (34605points) March 26th, 2010

AOL Explorer is licensed from Microsoft by AOL, but it doesn’t even support XHTML and lacks many of the features of any recent version of the mainstream browsers. Is it counted in the 54.5% of users using some form of IE, or is it down in the 1.78% using all other browsers together? If it’s counted with IE, does anyone have stats on what percentage of IE users it represents?

The reason I am asking is I’m working on how to resolve a nasty AOL Explorer error in interpreting a web page that must use XHTML 1.0 strict (It’s a Yahoo! MS Store, so the DTD is forced on me). The page just doesn’t want to behave at all in AOL Explorer, because its layout expects a browser to understand XHTML and CSS, and there isn’t any good way I can see to comply with XHTML and also satisfy AOL Explorer.

I’d rather not use browser sniffing and 2 separate page versions. I’m wondering if so few people use AOL Explorer that I can simply ignore it.

Wikipedia shows usages as
1—Internet Explorer (54.50%)
2—Mozilla Firefox (30.96%)
3—Google Chrome (5.61%)
4—Safari (5.27%)
5—Opera (2.10%)
6—Other (1.78%)

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4 Answers

njnyjobs's avatar

You can assume that AOL Explorer is bunched in with the Internet Explorer group as it is essentially IE Optimized for AOL. You can check here the main difference between AOL and IE browsers

njnyjobs (7592points)“Great Answer” (1points) Flag as…
ETpro's avatar

@njnyjobs Thanks. That’s what I was afraid of.

ETpro (34605points)“Great Answer” (0points) Flag as…
Kraigmo's avatar

now that the real answer has been provided….

I was under the impression that no one uses AOL Explorer because it hasn’t worked properly in over a decade. Isn’t even attempting to use AOL a waste of time?

AOL Explorer can’t even properly display classic HTML much less anything new. Services that are decades-old don’t even work on that thing. I think the rest of the world gave up on it; So you can too. AOL Explorer is so horrible, they will kill it or abandon it one day. Probably when their Microsoft deal ends, whenever that is.

Kraigmo (9223points)“Great Answer” (1points) Flag as…
ETpro's avatar

@Kraigmo I think you are close to right, but there are the die-hards. Lucky me, I have one as a customer and he wants AOL Explorer to work. Fortunately I found a trick with local styles that work to make the clunky, piece-of-junk browser see things properly without violating XHTML. The browser does not even support XHTML, which puts its compliance level back in the mid 90s somewhere.

ETpro (34605points)“Great Answer” (0points) Flag as…

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