AOL Desktop is an internet suite produced by AOL

AOL

AOL Inc. is an American global Internet services and media company. AOL is headquartered at 770 Broadway in New York. Founded in 1983 as Control Video Corporation, it has franchised its services to companies in several nations around the world or set up international versions of its services...

 that integrates a web browser

Web browser

A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...

, a media player and an instant messenger client. It is a revised version of AOL OpenRide

AOL OpenRide

AOL OpenRide was an Internet application suite made by AOL that combined e-mail, instant-messaging, a web browser and a media player in one window...

. The Mac OS X version is based on WebKit

WebKit

WebKit is a layout engine designed to allow web browsers to render web pages. WebKit powers Google Chrome and Apple Safari and by October 2011 held over 33% of the browser market share between them. It is also used as the basis for the experimental browser included with the Amazon Kindle ebook...

.

AOL Desktop is different from previous AOL browsers, which are still available. Its features are focused on browsing instead of email

Email

Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...

. For instance, one does not have to sign in to AOL in order to use it as a regular browser. In addition, non-AOL email accounts can be accessed through it. There are three main buttons: "MAIL", "IM", and "WEB". The first two require users to sign in but "WEB" can be instantly used.