To quote Robert Pogson:
“Netscape is one that was killed. They had a product widely used and M$ did illegal things to suppress it: exclusive dealing, buying up stocks and integrating IE with Lose ’95. M$ did not compete. They killed.”
In the alternative history that the freetards have romanticized, Netscape was an altruistic browser that was stabbed in the back by Microsoft with an Internet Explorer knife. In reality, Netscape was buggy, slow, feature-poor and the people building it didn’t know how to fix it. Not only that, they charged $20 for it!
While Netscape was languishing, Internet Explorer was improving with each version. What most people don’t realize is that back then, IE6 was considered to be the best browser anywhere by a wide margin. That’s right, the browser that everyone loves to hate these days was once considered top of its game. That’s how bad Netscape was in retrospect; Not only worse than IE6, but worse than IE5 as well!
Ironically, IE6 fell into the same trap Netscape did. The IE team was disbanded after IE6 and the project stagnated, giving the Mozilla Foundation time to rewrite much of Netscape’s source and release Firefox.
What the freetards don’t want to admit is that if it weren’t for IE beating Netscape into submission, Firefox would probably never have existed. Furthermore, they should be thanking Microsoft for pushing the idea of a free web browser.
As further proof that Microsoft did not, in fact, kill Netscape, this article quotes a source at Microsoft stating that millions of downloads and over 200,000 CDROMs were ordered for IE4. That’s users actively seeking out the software of their own free will, not being forced.
“Traffic to Microsoft’s Web site had been surging as the much-anticipated release date neared. On September 30 alone, the company recorded 1.5 million visits to the site. Microsoft also reiterated that 200,000 people had ordered IE 4.0 on CD-ROM.
Although Microsoft said it has increased the capacity of its Web servers, users have complained about congestion and busy signals at the Web site. The company boosted its site’s download capacity to 6.1 terabytes, which would allow about 450,000 browser downloads a day, a spokeswoman said. However, throughout this week, the site was jammed with traffic from users looking for the software, many unable to get in.”
Comments
I wonder when the BBEdit guys will sue Apple for including TextEdit in their OS. I guess they wouldn’t, because that idea would be frakking stupid.
Pretty much the reason why Internet Explorer became popular is because Microsoft just put it on Windows. Why use another browser when there’s already one?
“What the freetards don’t want to admit is that if it weren’t for IE beating Netscape into submission, Firefox would probably never have existed. Furthermore, they should be thanking Microsoft for pushing the idea of a free web browser.”
Wow. I did not know that!
Freetard mistake: “You fail to point out how your enemy influences you”
“Pretty much the reason why Internet Explorer became popular is because Microsoft just put it on Windows. Why use another browser when there’s already one?”
Did you not read the post!? IE4 predates the bundling with Windows. Instead, it was willfully downloaded 1.5 million times a day and over 200,000 CDROMs were ordered during the time of its launch. They were USING NETSCAPE to download IE4!
To be fair, microsoft gave internet explorer away to destroy the other platforms (and particularly those pesky macs), not in order to destroy netscape. Honestly, microsoft couldn’t care less about netscape.
Let’s be honest. The reason for the existence of activex and the reason internet explorer was standards incompliant even in things it could be standards compliant, was because microsoft didn’t want pages designed for IE to appear properly on other browsers. In other words, they wanted to create a new (closed) standard for webpages, compatible only with IE.
However, apple’s proved to be more that worthy at destroying themselves during the ’90s, so the whole thing was eventually unnecessary.
The funny thing is that, some years later, people requested standards compliance throughout the web not because they wanted to surf from another platform, but because the wanted to use a different browser (firefox) in windows.
“Not only that, they charged $20 for it!”
I though you (partially) opposed the idea of free as in free beer.
@administrator
I remember downloading Mozilla with IE when I was younger.
As the resident historian on this site, I should point out a couple of misconceptions.
First off, Netscape was to all intents and purposes free. I was in Silicon Valley in the late ’90s, and I don’t know of a single person who paid for it. Sure, there was supposed to be a “trial period,” and you were supposed to pony up (I seem to recall) $40, but nobody actually did, and what’s more, Netscape didn’t want them to. Read “In Search of Stupidity” for the gory details; some nitwit company (I forget which) actually licensed the thing, and Andreessen and Jimbo were shocked, because it wasn’t part of the business plan.
The business plan was, in fact, to make money off Teh Cloudz, ie the back-end corporate server market. Unfortunately, Netscape’s back-end stuff sucked; and there wasn’t the bandwidth for it; and Javascript made a lot of it less important; and, well, Netscape just didn’t execute well.
Of course, Microsoft were trying to do precisely the same thing with IE, which is why we ended up with two free browsers on the market — the reasoning was identical. It could be argued that, even with the shoddiness that was Classic ASP, Microsoft did a better job of monetizing the proposition.
And, naturally, despite almost identical strategies, Microsoft comes out as the evil one and the Phoenix-like Firefox (tongue rammed firmly between the cheeks of Google for life-support) is squeaky clean. Go figure.
The second misapprehension is this ActiveX stuff, which turned out to be a bit of a disaster for Microsoft. You have to remember that in 1997 nobody really grokked the Web. Plus which, the toolset was unbelievably primitive. While I’m sure the walled garden thing entered into it, the main purpose behind ActiveX was simply to make the browser act more like a desktop (and, given the security holes, it did a damn good impression of Win 95 in this respect).
Don’t believe me? Well, where do you think XmlHTTP came from? It could be argued that, by opening up this one single technology, Microsoft has contributed more to OSS than the most rabid Gnudroid. Hardly a walled-garden thing, is it?
I wouldn’t argue that, btw, because I think that all Web technology sucks. But it is arguable, nonetheless.
“I though you (partially) opposed the idea of free as in free beer.”
No, I have plenty of free-as-in-beer apps and games on my iPhone and desktop. Some closed source, some open source.
My opposition is only to open source advocates who claim that software I sunk time, effort and my own money into developing should be given away while I starve. They claim that to do anything else would be immoral.
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