Rating :
| Price Value : |  |
| Ease of Use : | |
| Connection Reliability : | |
| Speed & Performance : | |
| Quality of Customer Service : | |
Pros:
no comment!
Crons:
WHY I THINK AOL SUCKS
Ahhh, where do I begin? I'll start with the thing that made me the most ill, and add them as I think of them.
Timers
Those damned AOL timers. You've seen them. While typing an Email, surfing the net, reading a page or an Email, or sitting in a chat room, a timer message would pop up.... You have been inactive, if you would like to remain online click OK. Inactive my big ol' butt! I was typing a letter! And boy, if you don't catch it, off you go! Or, if you are surfing, and have two windows open, the timer will pop up between windows, and you won't see it in time, and bam, you have been booted.
Forget a download! You might be downloading something large (LIKE A BETTER BROWSER!), and if you are not right there watching, off you go, and you have to start over.
And how about the other timer.... You have been online for 45 minutes. Would you like to stay online? DOH! What are they really saying here? "Hey, you have been online long enough! You might pay for unlimited service, but we don't really want you to use it! Get off now!'
AOL's Browser
Has there ever been a worse browser? You might not know it, but you are missing out on a beautiful Internet when you are stuck with the AOL browser. It doesn't support so much that I can't list it here. Websites never look as good as the webmaster intended. It looks good in other browsers, but not AOL. AOL's browser doesn't recognize many colors. I have to always be reminded that there are a limited amount of colors I can use in text and backgrounds so that it looks good to AOL users as well as others. You don't have to deal with that! Even before I left AOL, I went and downloaded IE 4.0. Still, there were bugs, seems that AOL wasn't very compatible with it. That didn't surprise me, you will find a lot, and I mean a lot, of programs that clearly say that they will not work with AOL. Filling out online forms was an awful experience. I went to countless sites where a form was available to fill out for whatever I was there for, and sure enough, there was a note that the form wouldn't work with AOL, and to send them an Email with all the information instead, which meant a lot more typing, AND the fear that they might not even ever receive my
Email
If you have a website, did you know that your graphics are corrupted and might not even be showing up? That's because AOL has an option that compresses graphics the AOL way, and only other AOL users can see them if you save them like that. And the option is automatically on when you install AOL. They never tell you about it. I had countless pages up before I found it out. I kept getting letters from people telling me my site was awful, that my graphics were broken, and you couldn't see the light text on the page. I said "what"! I had a beautiful background and it was dark, so I used a light text. Come to find out, the background was not showing, so all they saw was the color behind it, usually light gray or white. DOH! You can turn this option off and then go around the web and resave all the graphics you had collected, but doesn't it piss you off that they had this setup in the first place?
You are also going to miss out on other very cool effects, like a lot of java scripts, and Cascading Style Sheets (like I use) and stuff.
AOL's Personal Publisher
It sucks!! Bad! There are countless problems. Especially with html codes you copy from the web for something like a banner exchange. The html code is read differently by aol than any other isp. Go figure. Plus, you have to become very proficient at html to link an image with it. You can't use the normal code, like
Additional Comments:
Read the following complaints I had about AOL, and see if you don't have the same complaints. If so, why are you still using AOL?
AOL has its good points. It's easy to use for the most part, has it's own chat rooms, and you get 5 personal Email boxes. Plus, the Favorite Places was pretty cool (but once I learned how to use IE's favorite places, I like it better).
But, none of these features made up for the lousy crap I had to deal with. So, I found a great ISP that had features and pricing I wanted, and I moved. I kept my AOL account for a month to make the move easier by catching Emails from people I hadn't added to my address book and informed of my new Email addy. I now have a great ISP and the Internet has been a much more enjoyable place.
|
|
