AOL launched what it calls AOL Desktop recently which surprisingly has pros and obviously cons as well. The installation was not the smoothest and it actually downloads the installation files from web which take some time. It took me around 10 minutes for it to install on my 1Mbps broadband connection and what I had no idea about the junk it was installing on my system.

It didn’t had the courtesy to ask me about any preference like installing a toolbar or creating a shortcut on desktop. I could have tolerated all that inspite of the fact that I hate toolbars had their product was compelling enough. Stumbleupon and the SEOquake are the two toolbars I use and I was not ready to devote one more to anyone, leave alone AOL.

This AOL desktop wants to shut down the business of other web browsers by providing the browsing application which gives you a feel of surfing web from a separate desktop inside the real desktop. It gives you option to have AIM and other email along with browser as well.

The best thing however was that pages were loading faster, it was taking half the time Firefox takes to open AOL page. Of course,the cookies might havehelped it to load faster but it also loaded other websitesrelatively fast. The faster downloading is the only good thing about it and I don’t know what AOL is trying to win with Desktop. I had no expectations from this particular browser or whatever AOL would like to call it when I started to review it but it does have some positive too. Try it for its merit else give it a pass.

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