The web browser built into America Online's software is proprietary and ancient. Both the Macintosh and PC versions of the AOL web browser were purchased from outside companies, and both are barely usable. In addition, due to the structure of the AOL network, transfers are always extremely slow, and graphics are often corrupted.
For the PC version, AOL bought a browser from BookLink that was arguably as good as Netscape 1.0, which was the standard at the time. However, AOL developed it only as necessary while Netscape continually enhanced its Navigator product. These advances in the HTML standard left AOL in the dust.
In America Online 3.0, AOL finally supports HTML 3.2, including such features as tables and frames. However, AOL's browser still omits many commonly used tags, and does not support animated images -- tremendously diminishing the Web experience.
AOL, when developing its Web software, decided that it made more sense to keep copies of all web pages that AOL members received on its own computers. That way, instead of letting each member get a fresh copy from the sending site every time it was viewed, it could simply be sent from the "proxy" machine. This helped keep AOL's already-sluggish Internet connection from grinding to a halt.
However, the fact remains that there aren't enough proxy machines to go around, forcing users to wait interminably while the proxy machine gets around to helping them. Also, these machines are frequently out of service, resulting in a lot of difficulty in connecting to Web sites. It is nearly impossible to load a graphics-heavy Web page without some of the images being replaced with error icons.
In addition, the AOL proxy machines convert Internet-standard GIF and JPEG graphics into AOL's Johnson-Grace compressed image format. AOL calls this "TurboWeb" and claims that it makes AOL web connections 3 times as fast as those from an ISP. This is an outright lie; instead of speeding the process up, the compression slows down the proxy machines yet more, making the whole process incredibly slow. Also, the image technology doesn't work well, often corrupting images by introducing bizarre color shifts or bands.
The AOL Web browser is simply not an adequate offering, especially when most members use AOL to access the Internet. With an ISP, users can choose the software they prefer quickly and easily, while on AOL using anything but the built-in browser is trouble-prone and unreliable.
