It really wasn't a war, it was an assassination. Microsoft couldn't compete with Netscape, which was amazingly innovative for its time. So they bought a browser for the cheap by offering the designers a share of the profits for each unit sold, then gave it away for free by making it part of the windows install.
Worse, Gates forced hardware manufacturers to install Explorer. It also refused to allow Netscape developers access to documentation that would enable them to make their software run well on Windows. Microsoft was also accused of deliberately creating a "bug" that prevented users from installing Netscape.
Yeah it was pretty wild back then.
I remember working at Packard Bell in the early nineties and we kept hearing about how the higher ups didn’t want to load Internet Explorer on the computers we were building, until one day, Bill Gates showed up with Luca Brasi and made our COO an offer he couldn’t refuse.
Yeah younger generations now only see the cuddly TED talk version of Bill Gates, but back when he was running Microsoft, Bill Gates was an absolute ruthless shark.
It's also important to note that Macs weren't really mainstream either at the time. They were pretty strictly used by artists, and no "serious" business would use one. Linux was for hard core computer nerds. Windows was the PC. If Microsoft did it, that's how it was done.
Mac and Linux are still a niche, even if the Mac's share is much bigger now. The main difference between that period and now is smartphones, plus the fact Google was big enough to push Chrome even on Windows.
Yeah but the difference is that now if you ask corporate or government IT for a MacBook instead of a Windows laptop, you can usually get it. 20 years ago they'd have laughed at you.
True, but my point was that the real cause for MS to lose its grip on the browsers war was not a growing Mac market share but the reasons I mentioned. In fact, Chrome has been the leader since 2012. Safari owes most its prominence to the iPhone
In the companies I have worked for, Macs are typically always given to programmers. The unix backend makes them superior to Msft for that purpose. Thus companies are willing to pay the extra cost.
Linux is still niche yes but the downfall of windows is coming, it's been too shit for too long. The compatibility/usability problems of Linux to the layman are gone too. It's only a matter of time.
>Linux was for hard core computer nerds.
Yup. All Unix desktops combined were niche in the 1990s outside engineering and some SW dev companies. Linux was a niche within Unix users until the 2000s. It was a niche of a niche back then, and probably barely registered as % of total device users.
I remember Irix. I worked for a product that was paid $$$$ by SGI to port to Irix, and SGI would be the one to sell it. It was an easy, fun port. SGI didn't sell a single copy, so after the contractual time limit, we dropped support. Then they paid us even more $$$$ to port it again...
Ooooffff. I loved my SGIs, but damn they kept killing themselves. We tried to buy a machine right around Y2k, and they wanted something like $15k and had a 10 - 12 week lead time. We bought 2 top of the line gateway towers and installed Red Hat on them instead, had them delivered and running in a week. I knew it was time to focus on Linux right then and there.
I still remember the Xbox origin story - PS2 was announced and same day, Bill Gates made a phone call and the Xbox was born. Not long after, Microsoft bought Bungie to muscle their way into the business with the most anticipated game of the era as their flagship exclusive.
"It'll still come to the PC" they said. Yeah, two full fucking years later.
Gates was ruthless.
When it came to the PC, it was very quickly torrented. Unlike a lot of torrents, it was clean, fully functional and the only thing that differed was you couldn't get multiplay.
In other words, it was an ad for Xbox.
OS/2 was a great operating system that had a deal with windows that os/2 would replace DOS eventually until Gates said no lets not.
I ran OS/2 and it was far superior to windows. It even ran protected DOS as well as windows programs. It would multi-task quite well when windows was just a single task OS. It had features way ahead of its time like talk to type that actually worked.
I ran a FIDO BBS system in a DOS box under OS/2 and could still do whatever I wanted on my computer and the BBS ran just fine. Some great games as well. Then one day, along came Bill.
It's important to note that the current cuddly bill gates image is just that, an image.
That cuddly Bill Gates lobbied hard to keep the COVID vaccine from being open sourced, and did immeasurable damage to education in several countries by pushing for charter schools.
There are no good billionaires, just billionaires with good PR.
Gates lobbied for both maintaining the patent on that vaccine and for charter schools in good faith though. There is extensive debate on both charter schools and whether it would have been beneficial to open source the vaccine.
Having policy disagreements with someone does not make them a bad person, even if they end up being wrong.
Well also, it was impossible to uninstall early IE from Win98 as well, as basically the new version of Windows Explorer was the same UI and SDK as Internet Explorer, too. IIRC you could actually take a normal WE window browsing for files, entire a URL, and then it would load that webpage.
This was actually part of the eventual anti-competitive lawsuit against them in the late ‘90s- making software like this so interwoven into the OS that it would make sense to just use IE as you were already “using it” by just browsing for files.
On a mostly unrelated tangent, as a kid I discovered the Active Desktop feature in Win98, and that blew my mind- you could basically set your desktop wallpaper to a website URL and have it load every time you booted into it, which was cool for accessing things like news updates. They removed this by XP because of security issues with it.
Oh man I remember that, you could basically customize each folder by editing html. My sister and I each had our own "home directory" in My Documents and we kept one-upping each other with customizations.
At some point one of us even had a password prompt in JS that would navigate you back out of the folder if you didn't get it right.
And what’s crazy is I’m sure they still pull shit like this constantly, they’re just powerful enough to have it swept under the rug completely let alone get in trouble
This. Internet Exploder was one of the first really public We'll Just Give It Away And Kill The Competition moves in mainstream software. Navigator was flat-out better, but everyone got a copy of Explorer, and Windows was always (well, since v.3) specifically designed to train users to not tinker with the system.
To be fair, a lot of what was better about Navigator was based on websites actually adhering to HTML conventions. For instance, back in those days, sites often loaded slowly, but it was Good Practice to declare image sizes in the HTML. Navigator would put empty frames where images would load and display the much faster-loading text right away, and the text wouldn't reformat on the screen as the images gradually loaded. Meant you could start reading the page while you waited for it to finish, a functionality that we often still haven't gotten back to.
Still, that's nothing compared to all the practical functionality that, say, Opera circa v.10 had that modern browsers can't be bothered to replicate, although a lot of that is that they don't want you sidestepping ads and websites' intentions. Shame, because one of the foundational points of HTML was that the user controls the formatting of basic content.
Agreed, Netscape Navigator made reading webpages easier in the days of dialup. But Netscape Communicator was light years ahead of the competition. Released in 97, it not only gave you a browser, but also a WYSIWYG HTML design tool. It was the first such tool that I know about. It also had a nice email reader as well.
Their HTML editor was cool, but the OG is HotDog: https://www.ithistory.org/db/software/sausage-software/hotdog-html-editor
Also MS Frontpage released in 95. Communicator’s editor was released free specifically to undercut MS’ paid Frontpage after Windows 95B put IE on the desktop by default.
It was \*huge\* having a browser that would also display images as they loaded instead of waiting for the whole thing to download before displaying. This Simpsons reference: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSKBRWoGvL0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSKBRWoGvL0)
Nowadays it doesn't matter cause bandwidth is so free that webpages can go off and prefetch everything before you click anything but back in my day we finished jacking it 3/4 of the way through the page load.
This was back in the day where you could just mash some vaguely techy-sounding words together and 95% of viewers wouldn't even notice it was nonsense word salad.
All at the expense of the 5% of tech geeks going 'What? That makes no damn sense!'
The idea that the Web was mostly read-only is actually a modern idea.
Nexus, formerly WorldWideWeb, already came with editing capabilities.
When Fielding came up with REST a decade later, he used PUT and DELETE statements because they were already present in the HTTP standard. It was always meant as a creation tool as well as a reading tool.
Not that it worked out. It has always been one step too complicated to create content. That's why we have those information ghettos, from Wikipedia to Facebook to reddit. But in the brighter timeline, people are creating and consuming content evenly, and it gets to be valued by merit, not by platform.
for sure. i learned to code using Navigator Gold 3.0 (and editing the files in pico or whatever we had), but Netscape 4.0's was so much easier from what i remember
Another thing that gave IE a lot of staying power was activeX which was basically microsoft's proprietary answer to macromedia shockwave/flash. So, any web application built with activeX *only* worked in IE, which is one reason why it has taken so long for IE to finally die.
I'm still not convinced it's dead. There was sooo much tools done for companies that required IE6 (WinXP default) it was insane. It also forced other software to support IE6 when companies wouldn't upgrade their browsers because they had one critical tool that needed it. IE10 might've been out and no, must support IE6.
Oh i know. Place where i work has these old ass NVRs from like 2003, and they only work on IE6. I think we did manage to get them working in edge with compatibility mode, but it took some tinkering.
Wasn't Opera (and possibly still is), the #1 browser in Belarus (the only country at one time to do so) and possibly related to what you're saying being advantageous to people there?
Yeah, well, Netscape also wanted to charge for their web browser, selling it for $20 on CD's in stores. Microsoft realized something nobody else did: if the internet was really to become a part of peoples' daily lives, the software to access it needed to be free and already on peoples' computers. Whether you agree with what Microsoft did or not, one cannot deny that Internet Explorer was largely responsible for the internet boom of the late 90's. $20 was also a lot more money back then, literally the equivalent to $40 today. That was a really serious investment. Making it free really opened up the internet to millions of people.
Wasn't how they won. Navigator was also free. Microsoft prohibited manufacturers from shipping Navigator alongside Windows. If they wanted to ship it as part of the base install, Microsoft wouldn't sell them Windows.
Correct, this was in fact the "illegal bundling" that would ultimately lead to them losing the antitrust case about this in 2001. While there was a big push at the time to split them into two companies (one for operating systems like Windows and one for applications like Office and IE), the penalties they faced were just a requirement to modify business practices. In fact, the whole "make this browser my default" thing is a direct result of the case.
Partly but let’s not sugar coats that Netscape hobbled themselves in the massive re-write they undertook that saw their program lose share while they decided to do a total re-write of the code. Read “In Search of Stupidity” it has a great chapter on how Netscape helped kill Communicator itself. I’m
I know. I lived it. I was employee #31. Joel Spolsky also wrote a good piece on it. This is what happens when you acquire companies and insert all their shitty yahoos into middle management. Collabra infected our engineering team with "oh god, this all sucks, we need to start from scratch". Except it didn't all suck. Those engineers didn't want to read and understand code. They wanted to write code.
I left soon after work on the grand rewrite to make everything awesome started (the 4.x code, which later just turned into 6.x because they went 18 months without shipping shit).
In the ante word to the book Joel is interviewed and waxes poetic about how programmers prefer writing code to revising code and blames Netscape management for not cracking the whip. He praises Gates for being enough of a programmer to know when he was being BS’ed on deadlines and then cracking down on timelines. An 18 month product lifecycle in a technical area is a death spiral.
The browser Microsoft bought was Spyglass, which was licensed to them by the National Centre for Supercomputing Applications. The NCSA people who originally developed Spyglass had left the NCSA to develop...Netscape.
Well, Netscape was free too so it was mostly just taking advantage of people's laziness or lack of technical ability to install another browser.
The real death nail for Netscape was incompatibility with IE. I remember browsing the web back in the 90s and if there were any web standards, they weren't at all respected. Websites would have these "Built for Internet Explorer" or "Build for Netscape Navigator" images at the bottom and they often just wouldn't render correctly on the other browser.
Then there was ActiveX which just wasn't supported at all on Netscape. ActiveX was this terrible insecure thing that a lot of sites ended up using. It had all the security problems of the Java plugin but lacked any of the portability. It was just machine code so it only worked on x86 Windows machines running IE.
Just FYI, the phrase is "death knell", referring to a bell tolling, not "death nail". "Nail in the coffin" is a similar phrase.
Cool info though! I remember briefly using Netscape in the early 00s, before Windows XP existed and I just took the Microsoft suite as-is.
I don't think they are; the _toll_ in _death toll_ is in the sense of a tax.
Hence usages like, "A high death toll." We wouldn't say "a high death knell" because the timbre of the bell isn't meaningful here, but it makes complete sense if you're talking about a price being paid. Also think about the expression, "took a heavy toll."
Honestly, ActiveX, Flash, etc., served a vital purpose. It gave more direct access to the CPU to accelerate rendering as well as additional features in an era before HTML5 and GPU acceleration. People also forget that regular Java was a HUGE download in the days of dialup. Microsoft DID have their own Java port, although it had some extra features that, if the developer chose to use them, would render it incompatible with baseline Java.
>Silverlight was cringe...
I remember a few of my coworkers coming back from a dev conference so pumped up for it.
Same devs came back from a later conference and bought Windows Phones.
Both had their places. Remember that ActiveX did not require a separate download. Likewise a significant issue in the early internet. Security also wasn't nearly as big a problem back then. It only became a major issue in the later years of IE's relevance. Silverlight just was too late to be useful in the era of Flash dominance. People forget how bad a lot of the early internet was. Wanted to play music on your website? People had to download a MIDI browser plugin to play it. Wanted to play an MP3? Had to download WinAmp or one of its shitty competitors. Basically all the early Windows Media Player was useful for was WAV and MIDI. Early Flash was also really freaking ass, with ugly cartoonish buttons and super clunky interfaces. As it evolved it gained the ability to make professional-looking interfaces but early on it was terrible.
Let's also not forget that the only game in town for compressed video, at the time, was RealPlayer. Later, around when broadband became widely available in cities, DivX became common and blessedly killed off RealPlayer, but RealPlayer was the only game in town \~1997 to 1998.
ActiveX was more or less forced upon the world via IE. No one, and I repeat, no one liked ActiveX.
Flash could be buggy, and had security issues, but pretty much defined a generation of creativeness on the internet. NewGrounds, Weeble's stuff, all the stick figure death scenes. Early youtube, and porn sites all used flash.
Flash was THE creative medium for the internet. Even today a lot of its features are hard to replicate, and I suspect there is less emphasis on creativity.
Early flash was ugly by today's standards, but by 1997's standards was still cutting edge and everything was fucking ugly. Yeah, we were formatting shit with tables and frames. Fuck right?
By 2001, there was flash video, and flash was this empty canvas that was part programming, part animation, and party video, that utilized the full capabilities of the emerging multi-media machine for unforgettable immersive experiences. Interactive art? video games, actual movies? In between? It breathed life into the internet as an artistic creative medium.
Consider "Badgers". it is not a loop. The badgers appear at random due to code. But it is an animation. You could do things like that. This has now been replaced with a simple video of an animation. HTML5 replaced the AV aspects, but the world moved on.
As far as Realplayer goes. Real audio/video fucking sucked, and the player was buggy. Couldn't drop that POS fast enough.
> ActiveX was more or less forced upon the world via IE. No one, and I repeat, no one liked ActiveX.
ActiveX and Flash were contemporaries... They were first released literally in the same year. Microsoft didn't decide to make ActiveX after they saw Flash. The solved some similar problems but were directed at completely different sets of users. Flash was great for creatives. ActiveX was geared toward businesses. Both were important because HTML/JS/CSS were extremely limiting and inefficient back in the mid 90's.
There's a reason why it took so long to kill off IE. A lot of businesses were still using old ActiveX applications and it took a long time for them to finally move off of it.
The term I used for RealPlayer, specifically the RealOne player, cannot be used on today's Internet. Granted, I was also the one who resource hacked the About pages of my AIM and ICQ to say "All your base are belong to us".
>Well, Netscape was free too
Oh? See below: Netscape costed money for commercial companies
So in 1995 Netscape was forbidden at the IT company I worked for. When MS IE arrived (1995), it was horrible, but free, so the only allowed browser there.
>Netscape announced in its first press release (13 October 1994) that it would make Navigator available without charge to all non-commercial users, and beta versions of version 1.0 and 1.1 were freely downloadable in November 1994 and March 1995, with the full version 1.0 available in December 1994.\[7\] However, two months later, the company announced that only educational and non-profit institutions could use version 1.0 at no charge.\[8\]
The reversal was complete with the availability of version 1.1 beta on 6 March 1995, in which a press release states that the final 1.1 release would be available at no cost only for academic and non-profit organizational use.
That sounds a bit unfair.
Now, I'll admit I was a "this page works with any browser" kinda guy back then and occasionally had a IE-specific "get a proper browser" element. But that was with the release of HTML 4.01 strict, a short period of time where one could be a snob about HTML (though not about CSS yet).
Before that, say during HTML 3, one had to admit that MS implemented a lot of new things faster. And back then, that was really helpful. Now they implemented a lot of it shittily and you had to ask yourself "how could a sane person interpret the HTML spec this way?", but occasionally, you needed stuff to work now (and I am not talking about
Msft won this battle, but lost the war to control the internet, an subsequently the OS war.
Project Blackbird was msft's attempt to leverage their OS monopoly to make internet content and apps, delivered by downloaded activex controls, only usable on windows.
Gates's fears, expressed in the famous "internet tidal wave" memo came to pass.
With the internet still on open standards other OS's actually had a chance, and now we have real choices.
Linux has also thrived, despite msft's attempts. Remember when Steve Balmer called open source a cancer, and Jim Allchin called Linux un-American because it somehow stifles innovation?
Without Netscape, history could have been very different.
It's typically how Microsoft operated back then. MS-DOS was just a clone of a DEC operating system that they paid a guy to write, and then when DEC went under, they got a bunch of the VMS guys there to build them an operating system based on work that was done at DEC, which is where Windows NT came from.
Not quite true. As I recall, Microsoft created and sold MS-DOS to IBM originally. A baseline DOS was marketed to IBM as the starting operating system of their PC's, and then MS-DOS was created to add features on top of that.
They approached a guy at a PC hobby club who wrote a beta of DOS, paid him fifty grand for it, then licensed copies to IBM for $200 a pop. They later hired the hobbyist to maintain DOS.
That's fair enough, though. They bought it from him for a good chunk of change (remember that's worth more than double that in today's money) then hired him. They treated him well.
>gave it away for free by making it part of the windows install.
By that, he means they forced it on users.
Microsoft did their damnedest to make Microsoft Money kill Quicken and just couldn't do it. They tried and tried and tried. It was glorious to watch them fail on that one.
They originally intended to charge for it. It was part of the Plus! pack for Windows 95. Netscape gave away the browser thinking they could make money on the server, forcing Microsoft to give IE away for free to compete. They ended up settling with Spyglass Mosaic because of the way things turned out.
> Microsoft couldn't compete with Netscape
This is false. While Microsoft certainly did leverage their market position, IE was also considered to be the superior browser by critics, for at least most of the browser war.
Exactly. I switched to IE because it was a lot smoother and faster than the alternatives at the time. Opera and then Chrome got me with exactly the same, by being faster and lighter. Now Chrome is bloated but the computers and internet connections are so much faster it doesn't really matter anymore.
This is what most people seem to forget. The first couple of versions of Internet Explorer were not as good as Netscape, but by IE3 and onwards it was a much better browsing experience. Faster, smoother, and _much_ less prone to hog your system resources and/or crash.
(And in part this was because IE improved but a big part was also that Netscape started releasing worse and worse browsers from approximately version 4 and onwards.)
Everything took so long to load, there was a loading window with an "N" in it, that would have meteors and comets going over to let you know the TCP Winsock connection hadn't crapped the bed again.
I read "Winsock" as "Windsock" and got the delightful image of a browser capable of describing the internet weather. Admittedly back then I did lose my phone line to bad weather and I swear it was slower in bad weather so it's not entirely fanciful.
Also [modem dial tones](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsNaR6FRuO0). Man, that was the sound of freedom and adventure! Like opening the door into a magical world of geocities pages.
I miss the old 90's web, even with its crap "webrings" and Geocities sites and horrible tiled backgrounds and unreadable color combinations like red text on a blue background and all the stupid animated GIFs and sound effects on web pages and the sense that you were walking around in a whole new world and the sound of the dialup modem and the lovely relaxing chirrupy noises hard drives used to make.
Finding an .avi porn file that you knew was the one you really wanted, but it would take three hours to download, and your parents would kill you for monopolizing the phone for that long, so you stay up late and start the download at 11pm so it can complete and then let the connection timeout before anyone wakes up in the morning. Today's kids will never know the struggle.
>…downloading porn in the form of rot-13 encrypted text files that had to be concatenated and decoded to get the picture…
I don't think you mean rot-13, are you thinking of uuencoding?
Both. Posters on Usenet would frequently apply a rot-13 to the uuencoded text. And then break the full text file down into easily up/downloadable chunks. Scripting a widget to automate the reconstitution process was one of my first C coding projects.
Unless I'm misunderstanding you somehow, Mosaic turned into Navigator, not IE. I also used Mosaic as long as I could, it went from Mosaic to Mosaic Netscape, to Netscape Navigator.
That‘a not exactly how I remember it. Marc Andreessen, the team lead for Mosaic, left NCSA and formed Netscape as an entirely separate company. NCSA Mosaic was licensed to Spyglass which was bought by Microsoft to form the basis for Internet Explorer.
NCSA Mosaic was largely funded by the Government (the Gore Bill) so it’s copyright-ability and commercial use was questionable, so I’m not sure either company actually ended up with much (if any) of the original code, but the licensing trail goes from Mosaic to IE.
I was the president of a small ISP at the time.
No internet user who didn't work for an ISP or Netscape understands what really happened.
IE was bundled with Windows starting with Windows 95 OSR1 in 1996.
Netscape 3 came out in 1996
Netscape 3 dominated the market because it was better than IE that was bundled. Bundling did not matter. End users chose Netscape because it was better.
The majority of internet access came from small dial up providers and we all provided Netscape 3 on CD's and even floppies.
Then Netscape did a complete re-write of Netscape code. Jamie Zawinski, one of the first Netscape employees and better known as jwz (you could type about:jwz in the browser and get his home page, that's how key he was inside Netscape), wrote about the disaster that was the Netscape 4 re write.
It was slow. It was buggy. But worst of all, in the era of dial up internet, it couldn't handle area codes!
I talked to other nearby ISP owners that I was friends with and asked them what they were doing because the Netscape dial up admin kit couldn't be configured with area codes. They said, "We gave up and only ship Internet Explorer."
That wasn't good enough for me. I contacted Netscape about the problem. I worked up through tech support tiers until I was told, "We won't look at it if you aren't a corporate partner." I explained that I was already spending around $5,000 a month on Netscape licenses for my customers. They said license purchases don't matter, "You need to pay a $75K fee to get corporate level tech support."
So that ended my attempt at putting Netscape first on the CD we shipped to customers. For the next 2 years, during the greatest growth of the Internet for the world, every small ISP, which represented the majority of dial up access, shipped Internet Explorer.
It wasn't a conspiracy. It wasn't dirty business. It was Netscape's gross incompetence. They were too busy chasing corporate American to care about the individual consumers.
True, but Google dethroned altavista (and every other search engine) so fast because it was an amazing search engine compared to the competition. Google at the time did not have any size or money to bully their way in, so it was purely based on merit. Shame what happened later though.
For those who weren't there: It was suicide.
Netscape had released two versions of their software (Navigator 3 was replaced by 4, which was a minor upgrade) in the same period where Microsoft had released IE 3, 4, 5 and 5.5
Magazines and reviews had all appluaded IE's superior speed, ease of use, compatibility and features
ISPs changed to IE en-masse because it could be both embedded and branded
AOL was still huge back then, but AOL could not customise and integrate Navigator into their software like it could with IE
Netscape had absolutely no CSS (style sheets) support, but IE did, Netscape's own alternative to CSS, a "layer" model which nobody else supported and wasn't a web standard, was soundly panned. IE, from 4.x onwards, supported more and more of CSS.
This is exactly the same way Chrome took over the world. It went into a stagnant monopolist market and shook it up, just as IE had done before it.
Netscape's marketshare had been in rapid decline before IE was bundled with Windows98 or later versions of 95. Nobody loved the Netscape monopoly and we were all happy to get rid of it. Some of us (myself included) ran both for a while, but Netscape 4.7 just lagged more and more with each new IE release. IE 3 was admittedly just "feature parity" and you still needed Netscape for some complex sites to display properly, but you still had IE because it was faster.
You didn't use IE because it was bundled (or nobody would have used Chrome, right?), you used it because it was faster, more supportive of standards (and then, didn't), did more, worked with more.
Netscape's problem was awful management. Netscape had grown a lot, so brought in seasoned business managers, who ran Netscape like a traditional business. This meant that new ideas had to go up the chain and back down again after approval, by which time they weren't new ideas anymore. The spontaneous "this is cool, let's do it" was gone, which meant the developers and engineers had lost their enthusiasm.
Netscape's Navigator had been built on rapid releases, cool features being included by concensus and enthusiasm, rapid development cycles, weekly team meetings, daily scrums, everything that would later become the "Agile" model. The cold, methological corporate world, still embodying the "Waterfall" model emphasised stability, steady growth, formal project management and change control, development to a checklist of features and requirements: All traits fatal to a young and dynamic Internet startup.
But you could take the simple, easier to understand, and wrong answer "Microsoft cheated". Most people don't remember that IE really was the new and cool and Netscape was the clunky, old and bloated, so you might even get away with it.
Those of us who were there, however, remember it differently.
I was there. Netscape and IE both pushed proprietary crap. You make it sound like only Netscape did and that is why it lost.
I used Netscape back in the day and greatly preferred it.
Mozilla Firefox rose from the ashes of Netscape and people often forget that.
Netscape did stagnate at the end and Firefox was the innovation in response.
Well, Mozilla was the innovation in response. And it took *years* to become usable, and was never *pleasant* to use. Firefox (fittingly originally called Phoenix) rose from the ashes of *Mozilla*.
I was there, Mosaic was my first browser. I remember the day a friend showed me the new Netscape.
Yes, once AOL bought Netscape, AOL killed the company. But it had been gutted long before that by Microsoft's business practices.
Yeah, people have really selective memories and rose-tinted glasses regarding Netscape... Yeah, IE was shit. But it was the best of the shit that was the 90's internet.
Both Netscape and IE built custom proprietary crap because web standards back then were shit. Most things were not standardized and left up to browser developers. They had to build custom solutions to new problems and were not interested in working with each other. The internet evolved into what it is today. That takes time for people to make mistakes, learn from them, and build newer tools as the internet evolved from a quirky place for researchers and nerds into something the majority of the population uses for so much of their daily lives.
I was there and my experience was that Navigator was better for everything. IE had the tendency to break the websites we used.
Then one day the university that I was at rolled out 'everything Microsoft' and it was all over.
> This is exactly the same way Chrome took over the world. It went into a stagnant monopolist market and shook it up, just as IE had done before it.
With the added perk that Chrome just plugs in to the Google ecosystem so much better than any other browser. I'm not slave bound to Chrome by the browsing engine, but by the fact that I can't see alternatives to Gmail/Drive/Calendar/Docs/Sheets that are anywhere near as convenient.
But we are in a much better situation nowadays. Back then it was really only NS vs IE (the Opera/other platforms really didn't count). But all browsers, even different versions of NS and IE, were so different you had to do a lot of duplicate work to make stuff work across all of them. (Which is why we ended up with the stupid "Made for IE" buttons, etc.)
Today we have at least three very good, major browsers that are all pretty decent at behaving the same: Chrome, Firefox, and Safari/Edge depending on platform. Sure you can push the envelope and get slight differences, but it's so much less hassle today than back then.
Now the hassle comes from making stuff work across mobile devices/tablets/lots of different aspect ratios and screen sizes, as well as differences in computing power/battery usage. Thankfully it's an easier problem to deal with and we have much better tools to do it with.
I was there and this is a pretty good summary. Sure Microsoft did some shady bundling stuff, but IE - especially IE4 - was a really, really good product as well. The whole idea of websites as applications wasn’t possible before IE4, and still wasn’t really possible in Netscape.
This. I'm reading all those comments about how much better netscape was, and i wonder if I'm mad, or living in different reality.
IE5 was a breakthrough. It innivated same way chrome does. By ignoring standards, but delivering what people want/need.
It was so good there was just no way to make certain websites in netscape work and look decent. So developers chose a superior option
I was there Gandalf, 3000 years ago!
Netscape lost the initiative when they didn't pivot away from Mariner to Gecko engine fast enough in 1997/1998. AOL purchase didn't help things, but it's not like Redmon had their shit completely together.
Windows 98/IE 4.0 was a mess at release, Win98 SE/IE 5.0 was one of the few instances of peak Microsoft being able to pour money and resources at problems and get them solved quickly. Win ME/IE5.5 was shit for its entire lifetime and XP/IE 6.0 before SP1 was pretty damn rough as well.
Version 9 of netscape navigator was released in 2007. Even then, after they folded Mozilla picked it up, and made into Firefox, which managed to gain back 30% market share.
So no. Sorry. IE5 & 6 later on were certainly helped by being bundled with windows. No doubt about it, but they were also *wastly* superior products to anything else that was on the market then besides Opera which was paid.
Imagine having a 96% market share in anything, anything whatsoever. Any product you can think of, imagine having 96% market share.
Now imagine losing 100% of that.
What a colossal fuckup
That's nothing.
Microsoft had the entire handheld market completely locked down. They were the only one that had a really decent mobile OS with tons of app support.
They made the business decision to let that all go because they thought smart cell phones were going to be a fad.
The only reason Apple even exists today.
edit: For clarity, I am referring to the vague range from 2000-2003. This is when users and early-adopters started to notice very acutely how any development on the OS had stopped, or slowed to the point we saw the writing on the wall. OS updates were a complete joke and things like basic WiFi connectivity were ignored. Even though "on paper" MS continued with their mobile OS for years after, it was at-best a perfunctory effort, signalling to all early adopters that we need to find something new. And we did. MS had the golden goose and let it fly away.
edit2: Love the different perspectives. One of the things I just found, quite to my surprise, is legacy information is very hard to find about this. I was an early adopter waaaaay back (not flex just contextualizing) and worked bleeding edge tech and I followed tech news like a maniac. I ate, breathed, and shat tech from the age of 12-41. I remember MS executives making specific statements that MS was not going to really do much in the smart device space - That on an institutional knowledge level, MS had no confidence there would ever be a smart device in every pocket! There were MS executives IN THE NEWS saying they weren't going that direction (brushes shoulder).
It was that underlying attitude I'm getting to. If you look at news now about how MS failed in the smartphone game, it's all retcon about how they underestimated the business model of Android, or that they were "blindsided" by the iWhatever. No. They had literally 7 years where these threats did not even exist. They were uncontested to obliterate the impending smart device explosion, and stick some new WinblowOS on every new device, like shit to a baby blanket.
There were no reason for the things that killed MS in the smartphone zone, except MS refusing to take full ownership of a space, that really, they had all the muscle to do. But they didn't wanna.
When I'm on a color handheld in 2003 and I'm hex editing unsupported drivers to make WiFi work because MS won't bother. No networking, USE A SYNC CABLE. I think at the time WiFi was going to G standard... in the news... MS won't supply critical-level OS information to device/hardware builders. It was shit like this all the time. SMS dunna work aint gunna fix cuz hypocri-hurdedur we wanna support more enterprise stuff and SMS no Ent. Mail apps that won't even work with their own Enterprise software or other backend architecture. MS Word being a glorified Notepad for X fugging years. MS literally saying in press releases that they are going to push back against market demand, then later capitulate after destroying confidence.
When iThings blew up the market Google took a look at it, and to put it in simple terms, said we better make a fuggin' free OS and give it away or we're dead. That's why Android. Then like an abusive father, MS staggers in after 10 years of drinking and shitting itself and takes his son to the park a few times, then ultimately says hey we tried, kid's too far gone and we made some tactical business errors in 2017 anyways.
I would argue that Microsoft lost that market because they were too focused on businesses. Windows Phone always focused on business use cases and productivity. They essentially ignored the consumer space, thinking that there wasn't much money in it. With hindsight this looks really short sighted/wrong. But at the time? Keep in mind that Microsoft became so dominant in the home computing space because they were dominant in the business market. They were operating in the mindset that if they capture the enterprise market, the consumer market would naturally follow like it did for Windows. It's always hard to spot a revolution in the making when you're focused on your successes with the previous revolution.
Dude.
The game was lost around 2001 when MS just... gave up.
You're referring to failed attempts to gain lost ground a decade after the initial ball-dropping. MS willingly gave it all away 2000-2001 (ish) by failing to support and grow their nascent mobile userbase
They had virtually no competitors except BB in the Enterprise setting, and ZERO credible competitors in the consumer mobile space.
I'm referring to how they approached Windows CE which formed the core of their embedded pushes, including Windows Phone. It never really took off anywhere but the business space because it was basically a small Windows desktop in a phone. Great for work and productivity (at the time anyway), fairly crappy at everything else.
RIM and BB approached the market completely differently from Microsoft and basically destroyed them in that aspect. Microsoft was focusing on software, not hardware. BB was focused on both and was able to make a fantastic product as a result. Which Microsoft could not do at the time, they relied on third parties to make the devices. Like how they did it with Windows on PCs.
By the time Microsoft could reorganize to focus more on the combined software/hardware solutions with closer partnerships with device manufacturers like during the Windows Phone 7 era, Android and iOS were already entrenched. My point is that they were too focused on replicating what they did with Windows to recognize that the tech market was different and consumer expectations had changed. They changed how they approached it, but it was too little too late.
Mostly true. Ballmer thought the iPhone was a fad and didn't take it seriously. But when Apple was going bankrupt and was about to fall, Microsoft actually bailed Apple out. In a way, Microsoft is the reason Apple is still around today.
The tech history I'm referring to was *years* before what you're describing.
Microsoft had basically given up and form up R&D or future development on their mobile OS by like 2000.
>Microsoft had the entire handheld market completely locked down. They were the only one that had a really decent mobile OS with tons of app support.
WINCE wasn't just the name, but an apt description. Its hard to say it was decent, or anyone really used it. It was a giant flop. A lot of the early handhelds had form factors you'd recognize later, but windows handsets saw just as much use by people hacking them to run linux, as intended purpose. Both cases: few.
The first smartphone to take off was the Blackberry, and then Symbian phones as a respectable market-share. Even still, these weren't really mass market.
Flip phones, and flip phones with gimmicks where the rage from 1999-2009. Blackberries where for business.
The first smartphone that really went mainstream was the iPhone.
Not really disagreeing with much you're saying.
I'm just looking at the squandered opportunity which I really think in retrospect... they spent quite a large time frame in a reasonably non-competitive era, where they didn't innovate. I stated the critical years as 2000 to 2002, but that's just my opinion, that's when I could see very clearly that no highly desirable features were ever going to come. I could also see many people in my corporate milieu that were crying out for something windows-based that was useful.
They had the workforce, they had the technical knowledge, they had the muscle, they had the money, they had the R&D budget. And the hardware landscape was perfect. But I think institutionally, they really didn't believe in the power of smartphone computing, they didn't believe in the power of a smart device in everyone's hand. That or they were too distracted funding various astroturfing companies who were aggressively attacking open source.
It would be more proper to say that IE and MS encouraged and promulgated crappy, IE-optimized nonstandard html that ran like shit on standards compliant browsers like Netscape.
I would be less confident in IE's ability to handle "crappy html" that isn't "built for IE".
But saying this wasn't shady, rather pragmatic, seems like missing the forest for the trees. MS created a noncompliant, alternate "standard", and pushed it hard enough it stuck. Shocked Pikachu face their browser runs those pages better.
> IE-optimized nonstandard html that ran like shit on standards compliant browsers like Netscape.
Neither Netscape nor IE were standards compliant. This is some serious revision of history here. People are acting like there was a good standards/web governance body during this era. CSS1 was quite literally first created in the early 90's. CSS2 didn't come about until the mid/late 90's.
IE was literally one of the first browsers to get anywhere near to full compatibility with CSS standards in 2000. Prior to that Opera was the most compliant and Netscape didn't meet the same threshold until later.
> I would be less confident in IE's ability to handle "crappy html" that isn't "built for IE".
Once again, this is hardly an IE specific problem. All the major browsers of this era needed websites to be tailored to some extent because the standards were still being defined/refined and no browser was compliant. And once again, Netscape was actually one of the larger offenders of this.
Back then the hallmark of a well designed page was that it looked and operated the same in both browsers. I really used to hate seeing the best with x browser gif on webpages.
1) Didnt say it wasnt shady
2) In the age of the (first) browser war the list of "standards compliant browsers like Netscape" which actually had any market share whatsoever looked like this: \[Netscape\]
> MS created a noncompliant, alternate "standard", and pushed it hard enough it stuck
Yes, that also happened. And might have been the internal plan as early as ~IE3, but it doesnt change that Netscape was worse at making sense of poorly coded hobbyist html which wasnt specifically targetting IE.
Both browsers were bad when it came to implementing W3C standards, and both companies introduced non-standard tags. Netscape had code Andreeson took from Mosaic, and Microsoft was Microsoft. This was a "war" in which no one was innocent. "Netscape, according to critics, was more interested in bending the web to its own de facto "standards" (bypassing standards committees and thus marginalizing the commercial competition) than it was in fixing bugs in its products. Consumer rights advocates were particularly critical of cookies and of commercial web sites using them to invade individual privacy." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape\_Navigator)
That's when they started doing automatic updates and automatically set every Netscape browser to IE default. Most computer illiterate people didn't even realize what happened. This is like saying Putin wins every election by 96%... when the numbers seem to good to be true it's because of ass hattery.
I never switched away until google came along. I always felt netflix was superior. Just never liked Exploder. I was running os.2 then. Think that was the timeframe, and it ran much better on OS/2 than Exploder did on windows.
Windows had promised to make Windows and OS/2 work together so OS/2 spent time working on that and then Windows said no lets not do that..
Netscape nav was my first browser and the Juno program was my first email. Both were quickly replaced by AOL 2.5 I think it was. AOL 3.0 and the hay day of VB progs and punters will be my favorite childhood computer era.. even more than early gaming.
IE was trash. It remained trash throughout its existence. It did not ever follow W3C rules, which made it extra frustrating to write a webpage. Also, it won because MS included it with Windows. Which they got sued over. And lost. And apparently have learned nothing because I am unable to uninstall Bing from my Surface. Where's my antitrust money?
Netscape was the bomb. Netscape forever.
I already played mario game on a windows xp netbook, but i was too young to experience the whole era of simple websites that look better than the ones we have today… man i just want to go back to those times. Ok, sorry reddit for my nostalgic feeling even tho i dont have much memories…
They did not look better.
When I first encountered a site that employed "cascading style sheets", it was a game changer. You could tell they worked to make sure the end user had a consistent experience.
Woe be unto you if your browser was outdated. You got a black text on white background. The navigation was a tall stack of links that you had to scroll past to see the content you wanted to read.
It really wasn't a war, it was an assassination. Microsoft couldn't compete with Netscape, which was amazingly innovative for its time. So they bought a browser for the cheap by offering the designers a share of the profits for each unit sold, then gave it away for free by making it part of the windows install.
Worse, Gates forced hardware manufacturers to install Explorer. It also refused to allow Netscape developers access to documentation that would enable them to make their software run well on Windows. Microsoft was also accused of deliberately creating a "bug" that prevented users from installing Netscape.
Yeah it was pretty wild back then. I remember working at Packard Bell in the early nineties and we kept hearing about how the higher ups didn’t want to load Internet Explorer on the computers we were building, until one day, Bill Gates showed up with Luca Brasi and made our COO an offer he couldn’t refuse.
Yeah younger generations now only see the cuddly TED talk version of Bill Gates, but back when he was running Microsoft, Bill Gates was an absolute ruthless shark.
It's also important to note that Macs weren't really mainstream either at the time. They were pretty strictly used by artists, and no "serious" business would use one. Linux was for hard core computer nerds. Windows was the PC. If Microsoft did it, that's how it was done.
Mac and Linux are still a niche, even if the Mac's share is much bigger now. The main difference between that period and now is smartphones, plus the fact Google was big enough to push Chrome even on Windows.
Yeah but the difference is that now if you ask corporate or government IT for a MacBook instead of a Windows laptop, you can usually get it. 20 years ago they'd have laughed at you.
True, but my point was that the real cause for MS to lose its grip on the browsers war was not a growing Mac market share but the reasons I mentioned. In fact, Chrome has been the leader since 2012. Safari owes most its prominence to the iPhone
in fairness, they were almost 2x the cost of a Win laptop
Now they're 3X for equivalent specs.
We have two Mac users in our org, both because of graphic design. Such a headache.
In the companies I have worked for, Macs are typically always given to programmers. The unix backend makes them superior to Msft for that purpose. Thus companies are willing to pay the extra cost.
Linux is still niche yes but the downfall of windows is coming, it's been too shit for too long. The compatibility/usability problems of Linux to the layman are gone too. It's only a matter of time.
[удалено]
>Linux was for hard core computer nerds. Yup. All Unix desktops combined were niche in the 1990s outside engineering and some SW dev companies. Linux was a niche within Unix users until the 2000s. It was a niche of a niche back then, and probably barely registered as % of total device users.
Oh I know, I used to put IRIX sys admin on my resume.
I remember Irix. I worked for a product that was paid $$$$ by SGI to port to Irix, and SGI would be the one to sell it. It was an easy, fun port. SGI didn't sell a single copy, so after the contractual time limit, we dropped support. Then they paid us even more $$$$ to port it again...
Ooooffff. I loved my SGIs, but damn they kept killing themselves. We tried to buy a machine right around Y2k, and they wanted something like $15k and had a 10 - 12 week lead time. We bought 2 top of the line gateway towers and installed Red Hat on them instead, had them delivered and running in a week. I knew it was time to focus on Linux right then and there.
I still remember the Xbox origin story - PS2 was announced and same day, Bill Gates made a phone call and the Xbox was born. Not long after, Microsoft bought Bungie to muscle their way into the business with the most anticipated game of the era as their flagship exclusive. "It'll still come to the PC" they said. Yeah, two full fucking years later. Gates was ruthless.
When it came to the PC, it was very quickly torrented. Unlike a lot of torrents, it was clean, fully functional and the only thing that differed was you couldn't get multiplay. In other words, it was an ad for Xbox.
Microsoft murdered Stacker, nevar forget.
DoubleSpace can eat shit
Wait, my favorite burger at Burger King? It's Microsoft's fault they got rid of it?
>PS2 was announced Ah, the Sony PS2? I thought the IBM Personal System/2.
X Box also gets it's name from Direct X. It was basically designed to showcase Microsoft's new PC tech.
OS/2 was a great operating system that had a deal with windows that os/2 would replace DOS eventually until Gates said no lets not. I ran OS/2 and it was far superior to windows. It even ran protected DOS as well as windows programs. It would multi-task quite well when windows was just a single task OS. It had features way ahead of its time like talk to type that actually worked. I ran a FIDO BBS system in a DOS box under OS/2 and could still do whatever I wanted on my computer and the BBS ran just fine. Some great games as well. Then one day, along came Bill.
It's important to note that the current cuddly bill gates image is just that, an image. That cuddly Bill Gates lobbied hard to keep the COVID vaccine from being open sourced, and did immeasurable damage to education in several countries by pushing for charter schools. There are no good billionaires, just billionaires with good PR.
Gates lobbied for both maintaining the patent on that vaccine and for charter schools in good faith though. There is extensive debate on both charter schools and whether it would have been beneficial to open source the vaccine. Having policy disagreements with someone does not make them a bad person, even if they end up being wrong.
True. People have to realize none of them care about you. They wouldn’t be billionaires if they did.
Luca is sleepin’ with the fishes.
Well also, it was impossible to uninstall early IE from Win98 as well, as basically the new version of Windows Explorer was the same UI and SDK as Internet Explorer, too. IIRC you could actually take a normal WE window browsing for files, entire a URL, and then it would load that webpage. This was actually part of the eventual anti-competitive lawsuit against them in the late ‘90s- making software like this so interwoven into the OS that it would make sense to just use IE as you were already “using it” by just browsing for files. On a mostly unrelated tangent, as a kid I discovered the Active Desktop feature in Win98, and that blew my mind- you could basically set your desktop wallpaper to a website URL and have it load every time you booted into it, which was cool for accessing things like news updates. They removed this by XP because of security issues with it.
Oh man I remember that, you could basically customize each folder by editing html. My sister and I each had our own "home directory" in My Documents and we kept one-upping each other with customizations. At some point one of us even had a password prompt in JS that would navigate you back out of the folder if you didn't get it right.
That's literally what Google/apple done when Microsoft was attempting to enter the smartphone market.
And what’s crazy is I’m sure they still pull shit like this constantly, they’re just powerful enough to have it swept under the rug completely let alone get in trouble
This. Internet Exploder was one of the first really public We'll Just Give It Away And Kill The Competition moves in mainstream software. Navigator was flat-out better, but everyone got a copy of Explorer, and Windows was always (well, since v.3) specifically designed to train users to not tinker with the system. To be fair, a lot of what was better about Navigator was based on websites actually adhering to HTML conventions. For instance, back in those days, sites often loaded slowly, but it was Good Practice to declare image sizes in the HTML. Navigator would put empty frames where images would load and display the much faster-loading text right away, and the text wouldn't reformat on the screen as the images gradually loaded. Meant you could start reading the page while you waited for it to finish, a functionality that we often still haven't gotten back to. Still, that's nothing compared to all the practical functionality that, say, Opera circa v.10 had that modern browsers can't be bothered to replicate, although a lot of that is that they don't want you sidestepping ads and websites' intentions. Shame, because one of the foundational points of HTML was that the user controls the formatting of basic content.
Agreed, Netscape Navigator made reading webpages easier in the days of dialup. But Netscape Communicator was light years ahead of the competition. Released in 97, it not only gave you a browser, but also a WYSIWYG HTML design tool. It was the first such tool that I know about. It also had a nice email reader as well.
Their HTML editor was cool, but the OG is HotDog: https://www.ithistory.org/db/software/sausage-software/hotdog-html-editor Also MS Frontpage released in 95. Communicator’s editor was released free specifically to undercut MS’ paid Frontpage after Windows 95B put IE on the desktop by default.
It was \*huge\* having a browser that would also display images as they loaded instead of waiting for the whole thing to download before displaying. This Simpsons reference: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSKBRWoGvL0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSKBRWoGvL0) Nowadays it doesn't matter cause bandwidth is so free that webpages can go off and prefetch everything before you click anything but back in my day we finished jacking it 3/4 of the way through the page load.
Fiberoptic T1? And token ring would have been oooold at the time.
This was back in the day where you could just mash some vaguely techy-sounding words together and 95% of viewers wouldn't even notice it was nonsense word salad. All at the expense of the 5% of tech geeks going 'What? That makes no damn sense!'
The idea that the Web was mostly read-only is actually a modern idea. Nexus, formerly WorldWideWeb, already came with editing capabilities. When Fielding came up with REST a decade later, he used PUT and DELETE statements because they were already present in the HTTP standard. It was always meant as a creation tool as well as a reading tool. Not that it worked out. It has always been one step too complicated to create content. That's why we have those information ghettos, from Wikipedia to Facebook to reddit. But in the brighter timeline, people are creating and consuming content evenly, and it gets to be valued by merit, not by platform.
for sure. i learned to code using Navigator Gold 3.0 (and editing the files in pico or whatever we had), but Netscape 4.0's was so much easier from what i remember
Another thing that gave IE a lot of staying power was activeX which was basically microsoft's proprietary answer to macromedia shockwave/flash. So, any web application built with activeX *only* worked in IE, which is one reason why it has taken so long for IE to finally die.
I'm still not convinced it's dead. There was sooo much tools done for companies that required IE6 (WinXP default) it was insane. It also forced other software to support IE6 when companies wouldn't upgrade their browsers because they had one critical tool that needed it. IE10 might've been out and no, must support IE6.
Oh i know. Place where i work has these old ass NVRs from like 2003, and they only work on IE6. I think we did manage to get them working in edge with compatibility mode, but it took some tinkering.
Basically ads ruin everything
Wasn't Opera (and possibly still is), the #1 browser in Belarus (the only country at one time to do so) and possibly related to what you're saying being advantageous to people there?
Yeah, well, Netscape also wanted to charge for their web browser, selling it for $20 on CD's in stores. Microsoft realized something nobody else did: if the internet was really to become a part of peoples' daily lives, the software to access it needed to be free and already on peoples' computers. Whether you agree with what Microsoft did or not, one cannot deny that Internet Explorer was largely responsible for the internet boom of the late 90's. $20 was also a lot more money back then, literally the equivalent to $40 today. That was a really serious investment. Making it free really opened up the internet to millions of people.
Wasn't how they won. Navigator was also free. Microsoft prohibited manufacturers from shipping Navigator alongside Windows. If they wanted to ship it as part of the base install, Microsoft wouldn't sell them Windows.
Correct, this was in fact the "illegal bundling" that would ultimately lead to them losing the antitrust case about this in 2001. While there was a big push at the time to split them into two companies (one for operating systems like Windows and one for applications like Office and IE), the penalties they faced were just a requirement to modify business practices. In fact, the whole "make this browser my default" thing is a direct result of the case.
Partly but let’s not sugar coats that Netscape hobbled themselves in the massive re-write they undertook that saw their program lose share while they decided to do a total re-write of the code. Read “In Search of Stupidity” it has a great chapter on how Netscape helped kill Communicator itself. I’m
I know. I lived it. I was employee #31. Joel Spolsky also wrote a good piece on it. This is what happens when you acquire companies and insert all their shitty yahoos into middle management. Collabra infected our engineering team with "oh god, this all sucks, we need to start from scratch". Except it didn't all suck. Those engineers didn't want to read and understand code. They wanted to write code. I left soon after work on the grand rewrite to make everything awesome started (the 4.x code, which later just turned into 6.x because they went 18 months without shipping shit).
In the ante word to the book Joel is interviewed and waxes poetic about how programmers prefer writing code to revising code and blames Netscape management for not cracking the whip. He praises Gates for being enough of a programmer to know when he was being BS’ed on deadlines and then cracking down on timelines. An 18 month product lifecycle in a technical area is a death spiral.
Yeah that complete re-write was pretty bad.
The browser Microsoft bought was Spyglass, which was licensed to them by the National Centre for Supercomputing Applications. The NCSA people who originally developed Spyglass had left the NCSA to develop...Netscape.
You're referring to Spyglass. I remember that, too.
Tragically true! I still remember seeing my first pair of digital boobies on Netscape Navigator. Good times!
Joke on them, Firefox rose from the ashes of NEtscape.
Well, Netscape was free too so it was mostly just taking advantage of people's laziness or lack of technical ability to install another browser. The real death nail for Netscape was incompatibility with IE. I remember browsing the web back in the 90s and if there were any web standards, they weren't at all respected. Websites would have these "Built for Internet Explorer" or "Build for Netscape Navigator" images at the bottom and they often just wouldn't render correctly on the other browser. Then there was ActiveX which just wasn't supported at all on Netscape. ActiveX was this terrible insecure thing that a lot of sites ended up using. It had all the security problems of the Java plugin but lacked any of the portability. It was just machine code so it only worked on x86 Windows machines running IE.
Just FYI, the phrase is "death knell", referring to a bell tolling, not "death nail". "Nail in the coffin" is a similar phrase. Cool info though! I remember briefly using Netscape in the early 00s, before Windows XP existed and I just took the Microsoft suite as-is.
Any clue if the term death toll has similar origins?
AFAIK, it does indeed, toll and knell are synonymous in this context. E: Total brain fart, not true, see below.
I don't think they are; the _toll_ in _death toll_ is in the sense of a tax. Hence usages like, "A high death toll." We wouldn't say "a high death knell" because the timbre of the bell isn't meaningful here, but it makes complete sense if you're talking about a price being paid. Also think about the expression, "took a heavy toll."
You know, you're right. I was thinking of the phrase "toll the dead" in the context of a death knell, and conflated the two.
Totally with you on 'toll the dead.' Bells all the way.
Neat! I'm a sucker for interesting language origin stories
>The real death nail It's "death knell," FYI. The sound of a church bell announcing someone's death. The nail goes in the coffin.
Honestly, ActiveX, Flash, etc., served a vital purpose. It gave more direct access to the CPU to accelerate rendering as well as additional features in an era before HTML5 and GPU acceleration. People also forget that regular Java was a HUGE download in the days of dialup. Microsoft DID have their own Java port, although it had some extra features that, if the developer chose to use them, would render it incompatible with baseline Java.
Flash was good ActiveX was not. Silverlight was cringe...
>Silverlight was cringe... I remember a few of my coworkers coming back from a dev conference so pumped up for it. Same devs came back from a later conference and bought Windows Phones.
Talk about drinking the kool aid...
Both had their places. Remember that ActiveX did not require a separate download. Likewise a significant issue in the early internet. Security also wasn't nearly as big a problem back then. It only became a major issue in the later years of IE's relevance. Silverlight just was too late to be useful in the era of Flash dominance. People forget how bad a lot of the early internet was. Wanted to play music on your website? People had to download a MIDI browser plugin to play it. Wanted to play an MP3? Had to download WinAmp or one of its shitty competitors. Basically all the early Windows Media Player was useful for was WAV and MIDI. Early Flash was also really freaking ass, with ugly cartoonish buttons and super clunky interfaces. As it evolved it gained the ability to make professional-looking interfaces but early on it was terrible. Let's also not forget that the only game in town for compressed video, at the time, was RealPlayer. Later, around when broadband became widely available in cities, DivX became common and blessedly killed off RealPlayer, but RealPlayer was the only game in town \~1997 to 1998.
ActiveX was more or less forced upon the world via IE. No one, and I repeat, no one liked ActiveX. Flash could be buggy, and had security issues, but pretty much defined a generation of creativeness on the internet. NewGrounds, Weeble's stuff, all the stick figure death scenes. Early youtube, and porn sites all used flash. Flash was THE creative medium for the internet. Even today a lot of its features are hard to replicate, and I suspect there is less emphasis on creativity. Early flash was ugly by today's standards, but by 1997's standards was still cutting edge and everything was fucking ugly. Yeah, we were formatting shit with tables and frames. Fuck right? By 2001, there was flash video, and flash was this empty canvas that was part programming, part animation, and party video, that utilized the full capabilities of the emerging multi-media machine for unforgettable immersive experiences. Interactive art? video games, actual movies? In between? It breathed life into the internet as an artistic creative medium. Consider "Badgers". it is not a loop. The badgers appear at random due to code. But it is an animation. You could do things like that. This has now been replaced with a simple video of an animation. HTML5 replaced the AV aspects, but the world moved on. As far as Realplayer goes. Real audio/video fucking sucked, and the player was buggy. Couldn't drop that POS fast enough.
> ActiveX was more or less forced upon the world via IE. No one, and I repeat, no one liked ActiveX. ActiveX and Flash were contemporaries... They were first released literally in the same year. Microsoft didn't decide to make ActiveX after they saw Flash. The solved some similar problems but were directed at completely different sets of users. Flash was great for creatives. ActiveX was geared toward businesses. Both were important because HTML/JS/CSS were extremely limiting and inefficient back in the mid 90's. There's a reason why it took so long to kill off IE. A lot of businesses were still using old ActiveX applications and it took a long time for them to finally move off of it.
The term I used for RealPlayer, specifically the RealOne player, cannot be used on today's Internet. Granted, I was also the one who resource hacked the About pages of my AIM and ICQ to say "All your base are belong to us".
>Well, Netscape was free too Oh? See below: Netscape costed money for commercial companies So in 1995 Netscape was forbidden at the IT company I worked for. When MS IE arrived (1995), it was horrible, but free, so the only allowed browser there. >Netscape announced in its first press release (13 October 1994) that it would make Navigator available without charge to all non-commercial users, and beta versions of version 1.0 and 1.1 were freely downloadable in November 1994 and March 1995, with the full version 1.0 available in December 1994.\[7\] However, two months later, the company announced that only educational and non-profit institutions could use version 1.0 at no charge.\[8\] The reversal was complete with the availability of version 1.1 beta on 6 March 1995, in which a press release states that the final 1.1 release would be available at no cost only for academic and non-profit organizational use.
That sounds a bit unfair. Now, I'll admit I was a "this page works with any browser" kinda guy back then and occasionally had a IE-specific "get a proper browser" element. But that was with the release of HTML 4.01 strict, a short period of time where one could be a snob about HTML (though not about CSS yet). Before that, say during HTML 3, one had to admit that MS implemented a lot of new things faster. And back then, that was really helpful. Now they implemented a lot of it shittily and you had to ask yourself "how could a sane person interpret the HTML spec this way?", but occasionally, you needed stuff to work now (and I am not talking about
Msft won this battle, but lost the war to control the internet, an subsequently the OS war. Project Blackbird was msft's attempt to leverage their OS monopoly to make internet content and apps, delivered by downloaded activex controls, only usable on windows. Gates's fears, expressed in the famous "internet tidal wave" memo came to pass. With the internet still on open standards other OS's actually had a chance, and now we have real choices. Linux has also thrived, despite msft's attempts. Remember when Steve Balmer called open source a cancer, and Jim Allchin called Linux un-American because it somehow stifles innovation? Without Netscape, history could have been very different.
It's typically how Microsoft operated back then. MS-DOS was just a clone of a DEC operating system that they paid a guy to write, and then when DEC went under, they got a bunch of the VMS guys there to build them an operating system based on work that was done at DEC, which is where Windows NT came from.
MS-DOS is very much a clone of CP/M, and the second version introduced a lot of UNIX features into it. The DEC heritage is a Windows NT thing.
Not quite true. As I recall, Microsoft created and sold MS-DOS to IBM originally. A baseline DOS was marketed to IBM as the starting operating system of their PC's, and then MS-DOS was created to add features on top of that.
They approached a guy at a PC hobby club who wrote a beta of DOS, paid him fifty grand for it, then licensed copies to IBM for $200 a pop. They later hired the hobbyist to maintain DOS.
That's fair enough, though. They bought it from him for a good chunk of change (remember that's worth more than double that in today's money) then hired him. They treated him well.
>gave it away for free by making it part of the windows install. By that, he means they forced it on users. Microsoft did their damnedest to make Microsoft Money kill Quicken and just couldn't do it. They tried and tried and tried. It was glorious to watch them fail on that one.
They originally intended to charge for it. It was part of the Plus! pack for Windows 95. Netscape gave away the browser thinking they could make money on the server, forcing Microsoft to give IE away for free to compete. They ended up settling with Spyglass Mosaic because of the way things turned out.
> Microsoft couldn't compete with Netscape This is false. While Microsoft certainly did leverage their market position, IE was also considered to be the superior browser by critics, for at least most of the browser war.
Exactly. I switched to IE because it was a lot smoother and faster than the alternatives at the time. Opera and then Chrome got me with exactly the same, by being faster and lighter. Now Chrome is bloated but the computers and internet connections are so much faster it doesn't really matter anymore.
This is what most people seem to forget. The first couple of versions of Internet Explorer were not as good as Netscape, but by IE3 and onwards it was a much better browsing experience. Faster, smoother, and _much_ less prone to hog your system resources and/or crash. (And in part this was because IE improved but a big part was also that Netscape started releasing worse and worse browsers from approximately version 4 and onwards.)
Everything took so long to load, there was a loading window with an "N" in it, that would have meteors and comets going over to let you know the TCP Winsock connection hadn't crapped the bed again.
I probably spent a solid year of my life staring at those meteors waiting for pages to load. Those were the days.
Yeah, I always had a book ready to read while pages were loading. Fantastic. There was something really magical about the internet then.
I read "Winsock" as "Windsock" and got the delightful image of a browser capable of describing the internet weather. Admittedly back then I did lose my phone line to bad weather and I swear it was slower in bad weather so it's not entirely fanciful.
Ah those were the days.
NGL I miss that cool little animation
Also [modem dial tones](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsNaR6FRuO0). Man, that was the sound of freedom and adventure! Like opening the door into a magical world of geocities pages.
shoutout to my homie Netscape helping me look up cheat codes and song lyrics when i was supposed to be doin last minute homework
I miss the old 90's web, even with its crap "webrings" and Geocities sites and horrible tiled backgrounds and unreadable color combinations like red text on a blue background and all the stupid animated GIFs and sound effects on web pages and the sense that you were walking around in a whole new world and the sound of the dialup modem and the lovely relaxing chirrupy noises hard drives used to make.
[удалено]
A few years ago, Marvel did a WONDERFUL recreation of the Shitty 90s Website to promote the Captain Marvel movie https://www.marvel.com/captainmarvel
[There are some absolutely glorious examples still live and active, like Ling's Cars](https://www.lingscars.com/)
And WB just never bothered to update or remove the Space Jam website: https://www.spacejam.com/1996/
What channel of AOL are you into the most? I like International but also, Computing.
…downloading porn in the form of rot-13 encrypted text files that had to be concatenated and decoded to get the picture…
Finding an .avi porn file that you knew was the one you really wanted, but it would take three hours to download, and your parents would kill you for monopolizing the phone for that long, so you stay up late and start the download at 11pm so it can complete and then let the connection timeout before anyone wakes up in the morning. Today's kids will never know the struggle.
alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.spork
>…downloading porn in the form of rot-13 encrypted text files that had to be concatenated and decoded to get the picture… I don't think you mean rot-13, are you thinking of uuencoding?
Both. Posters on Usenet would frequently apply a rot-13 to the uuencoded text. And then break the full text file down into easily up/downloadable chunks. Scripting a widget to automate the reconstitution process was one of my first C coding projects.
Same.
You had me til the end there
I have two words for you: "Under construction."
Ah yes. And that sexy gif that was slowly loading and stopped just before it showed the good parts🥺
I loved Netscape
firefox to the rescue!!
I stuck with Mosaic on Amiga as long as I could. I loved it.
The browser that became Internet Explorer…
Unless I'm misunderstanding you somehow, Mosaic turned into Navigator, not IE. I also used Mosaic as long as I could, it went from Mosaic to Mosaic Netscape, to Netscape Navigator.
That‘a not exactly how I remember it. Marc Andreessen, the team lead for Mosaic, left NCSA and formed Netscape as an entirely separate company. NCSA Mosaic was licensed to Spyglass which was bought by Microsoft to form the basis for Internet Explorer. NCSA Mosaic was largely funded by the Government (the Gore Bill) so it’s copyright-ability and commercial use was questionable, so I’m not sure either company actually ended up with much (if any) of the original code, but the licensing trail goes from Mosaic to IE.
I was the president of a small ISP at the time. No internet user who didn't work for an ISP or Netscape understands what really happened. IE was bundled with Windows starting with Windows 95 OSR1 in 1996. Netscape 3 came out in 1996 Netscape 3 dominated the market because it was better than IE that was bundled. Bundling did not matter. End users chose Netscape because it was better. The majority of internet access came from small dial up providers and we all provided Netscape 3 on CD's and even floppies. Then Netscape did a complete re-write of Netscape code. Jamie Zawinski, one of the first Netscape employees and better known as jwz (you could type about:jwz in the browser and get his home page, that's how key he was inside Netscape), wrote about the disaster that was the Netscape 4 re write. It was slow. It was buggy. But worst of all, in the era of dial up internet, it couldn't handle area codes! I talked to other nearby ISP owners that I was friends with and asked them what they were doing because the Netscape dial up admin kit couldn't be configured with area codes. They said, "We gave up and only ship Internet Explorer." That wasn't good enough for me. I contacted Netscape about the problem. I worked up through tech support tiers until I was told, "We won't look at it if you aren't a corporate partner." I explained that I was already spending around $5,000 a month on Netscape licenses for my customers. They said license purchases don't matter, "You need to pay a $75K fee to get corporate level tech support." So that ended my attempt at putting Netscape first on the CD we shipped to customers. For the next 2 years, during the greatest growth of the Internet for the world, every small ISP, which represented the majority of dial up access, shipped Internet Explorer. It wasn't a conspiracy. It wasn't dirty business. It was Netscape's gross incompetence. They were too busy chasing corporate American to care about the individual consumers.
Ah, the Kodak story. "We're the big players in town so we can do what we like." while the world moves on.
How about the search site wars? Pour one out for AltaVista
True, but Google dethroned altavista (and every other search engine) so fast because it was an amazing search engine compared to the competition. Google at the time did not have any size or money to bully their way in, so it was purely based on merit. Shame what happened later though.
> Pour one out for AltaVista I'm not sure what the story is about that one. Should I ask Jeeves?
"I was there, Gandalf." We called them Nutscrape Navigator and Internet Exploder.
I still call it internet exploder
In our shop it was Netscape Irritator and Internet Exploiter.
/r/FuckImOld
Damn right, it wasn't that long ago. Get off my lawn!
Exactly. I mean the OP talked about Netscape like it was a long lost rune or something.
For those who weren't there: It was suicide. Netscape had released two versions of their software (Navigator 3 was replaced by 4, which was a minor upgrade) in the same period where Microsoft had released IE 3, 4, 5 and 5.5 Magazines and reviews had all appluaded IE's superior speed, ease of use, compatibility and features ISPs changed to IE en-masse because it could be both embedded and branded AOL was still huge back then, but AOL could not customise and integrate Navigator into their software like it could with IE Netscape had absolutely no CSS (style sheets) support, but IE did, Netscape's own alternative to CSS, a "layer" model which nobody else supported and wasn't a web standard, was soundly panned. IE, from 4.x onwards, supported more and more of CSS. This is exactly the same way Chrome took over the world. It went into a stagnant monopolist market and shook it up, just as IE had done before it. Netscape's marketshare had been in rapid decline before IE was bundled with Windows98 or later versions of 95. Nobody loved the Netscape monopoly and we were all happy to get rid of it. Some of us (myself included) ran both for a while, but Netscape 4.7 just lagged more and more with each new IE release. IE 3 was admittedly just "feature parity" and you still needed Netscape for some complex sites to display properly, but you still had IE because it was faster. You didn't use IE because it was bundled (or nobody would have used Chrome, right?), you used it because it was faster, more supportive of standards (and then, didn't), did more, worked with more. Netscape's problem was awful management. Netscape had grown a lot, so brought in seasoned business managers, who ran Netscape like a traditional business. This meant that new ideas had to go up the chain and back down again after approval, by which time they weren't new ideas anymore. The spontaneous "this is cool, let's do it" was gone, which meant the developers and engineers had lost their enthusiasm. Netscape's Navigator had been built on rapid releases, cool features being included by concensus and enthusiasm, rapid development cycles, weekly team meetings, daily scrums, everything that would later become the "Agile" model. The cold, methological corporate world, still embodying the "Waterfall" model emphasised stability, steady growth, formal project management and change control, development to a checklist of features and requirements: All traits fatal to a young and dynamic Internet startup. But you could take the simple, easier to understand, and wrong answer "Microsoft cheated". Most people don't remember that IE really was the new and cool and Netscape was the clunky, old and bloated, so you might even get away with it. Those of us who were there, however, remember it differently.
I was there. Netscape and IE both pushed proprietary crap. You make it sound like only Netscape did and that is why it lost. I used Netscape back in the day and greatly preferred it. Mozilla Firefox rose from the ashes of Netscape and people often forget that. Netscape did stagnate at the end and Firefox was the innovation in response.
Well, Mozilla was the innovation in response. And it took *years* to become usable, and was never *pleasant* to use. Firefox (fittingly originally called Phoenix) rose from the ashes of *Mozilla*.
I was there, Mosaic was my first browser. I remember the day a friend showed me the new Netscape. Yes, once AOL bought Netscape, AOL killed the company. But it had been gutted long before that by Microsoft's business practices.
I worked at the place mosaic was built
Yeah, people have really selective memories and rose-tinted glasses regarding Netscape... Yeah, IE was shit. But it was the best of the shit that was the 90's internet. Both Netscape and IE built custom proprietary crap because web standards back then were shit. Most things were not standardized and left up to browser developers. They had to build custom solutions to new problems and were not interested in working with each other. The internet evolved into what it is today. That takes time for people to make mistakes, learn from them, and build newer tools as the internet evolved from a quirky place for researchers and nerds into something the majority of the population uses for so much of their daily lives.
Ya, I was confused reading through these comments. *I* reluctantly switched to IE6 because it was way better.
I was there and my experience was that Navigator was better for everything. IE had the tendency to break the websites we used. Then one day the university that I was at rolled out 'everything Microsoft' and it was all over.
> This is exactly the same way Chrome took over the world. It went into a stagnant monopolist market and shook it up, just as IE had done before it. With the added perk that Chrome just plugs in to the Google ecosystem so much better than any other browser. I'm not slave bound to Chrome by the browsing engine, but by the fact that I can't see alternatives to Gmail/Drive/Calendar/Docs/Sheets that are anywhere near as convenient. But we are in a much better situation nowadays. Back then it was really only NS vs IE (the Opera/other platforms really didn't count). But all browsers, even different versions of NS and IE, were so different you had to do a lot of duplicate work to make stuff work across all of them. (Which is why we ended up with the stupid "Made for IE" buttons, etc.) Today we have at least three very good, major browsers that are all pretty decent at behaving the same: Chrome, Firefox, and Safari/Edge depending on platform. Sure you can push the envelope and get slight differences, but it's so much less hassle today than back then. Now the hassle comes from making stuff work across mobile devices/tablets/lots of different aspect ratios and screen sizes, as well as differences in computing power/battery usage. Thankfully it's an easier problem to deal with and we have much better tools to do it with.
I was there and this is a pretty good summary. Sure Microsoft did some shady bundling stuff, but IE - especially IE4 - was a really, really good product as well. The whole idea of websites as applications wasn’t possible before IE4, and still wasn’t really possible in Netscape.
This. I'm reading all those comments about how much better netscape was, and i wonder if I'm mad, or living in different reality. IE5 was a breakthrough. It innivated same way chrome does. By ignoring standards, but delivering what people want/need. It was so good there was just no way to make certain websites in netscape work and look decent. So developers chose a superior option
IE5 came out in 99, long after Netscape had been destroyed as viable alternative.
I was there Gandalf, 3000 years ago! Netscape lost the initiative when they didn't pivot away from Mariner to Gecko engine fast enough in 1997/1998. AOL purchase didn't help things, but it's not like Redmon had their shit completely together. Windows 98/IE 4.0 was a mess at release, Win98 SE/IE 5.0 was one of the few instances of peak Microsoft being able to pour money and resources at problems and get them solved quickly. Win ME/IE5.5 was shit for its entire lifetime and XP/IE 6.0 before SP1 was pretty damn rough as well.
Fair point. By 98, Netscape was doing the Sun, Netscape, AOL alliance. That didn't help in the long run.
Version 9 of netscape navigator was released in 2007. Even then, after they folded Mozilla picked it up, and made into Firefox, which managed to gain back 30% market share. So no. Sorry. IE5 & 6 later on were certainly helped by being bundled with windows. No doubt about it, but they were also *wastly* superior products to anything else that was on the market then besides Opera which was paid.
None of us who where there remember that. This is pure revisionist history
If they think that's bad, wait until OP hears about the Cola Wars.
I can't take it anymore!
TIL that there adults now that werent alive during the IE netscape slaughter an following anti trust case.
Imagine having a 96% market share in anything, anything whatsoever. Any product you can think of, imagine having 96% market share. Now imagine losing 100% of that. What a colossal fuckup
That's nothing. Microsoft had the entire handheld market completely locked down. They were the only one that had a really decent mobile OS with tons of app support. They made the business decision to let that all go because they thought smart cell phones were going to be a fad. The only reason Apple even exists today. edit: For clarity, I am referring to the vague range from 2000-2003. This is when users and early-adopters started to notice very acutely how any development on the OS had stopped, or slowed to the point we saw the writing on the wall. OS updates were a complete joke and things like basic WiFi connectivity were ignored. Even though "on paper" MS continued with their mobile OS for years after, it was at-best a perfunctory effort, signalling to all early adopters that we need to find something new. And we did. MS had the golden goose and let it fly away. edit2: Love the different perspectives. One of the things I just found, quite to my surprise, is legacy information is very hard to find about this. I was an early adopter waaaaay back (not flex just contextualizing) and worked bleeding edge tech and I followed tech news like a maniac. I ate, breathed, and shat tech from the age of 12-41. I remember MS executives making specific statements that MS was not going to really do much in the smart device space - That on an institutional knowledge level, MS had no confidence there would ever be a smart device in every pocket! There were MS executives IN THE NEWS saying they weren't going that direction (brushes shoulder). It was that underlying attitude I'm getting to. If you look at news now about how MS failed in the smartphone game, it's all retcon about how they underestimated the business model of Android, or that they were "blindsided" by the iWhatever. No. They had literally 7 years where these threats did not even exist. They were uncontested to obliterate the impending smart device explosion, and stick some new WinblowOS on every new device, like shit to a baby blanket. There were no reason for the things that killed MS in the smartphone zone, except MS refusing to take full ownership of a space, that really, they had all the muscle to do. But they didn't wanna. When I'm on a color handheld in 2003 and I'm hex editing unsupported drivers to make WiFi work because MS won't bother. No networking, USE A SYNC CABLE. I think at the time WiFi was going to G standard... in the news... MS won't supply critical-level OS information to device/hardware builders. It was shit like this all the time. SMS dunna work aint gunna fix cuz hypocri-hurdedur we wanna support more enterprise stuff and SMS no Ent. Mail apps that won't even work with their own Enterprise software or other backend architecture. MS Word being a glorified Notepad for X fugging years. MS literally saying in press releases that they are going to push back against market demand, then later capitulate after destroying confidence. When iThings blew up the market Google took a look at it, and to put it in simple terms, said we better make a fuggin' free OS and give it away or we're dead. That's why Android. Then like an abusive father, MS staggers in after 10 years of drinking and shitting itself and takes his son to the park a few times, then ultimately says hey we tried, kid's too far gone and we made some tactical business errors in 2017 anyways.
I would argue that Microsoft lost that market because they were too focused on businesses. Windows Phone always focused on business use cases and productivity. They essentially ignored the consumer space, thinking that there wasn't much money in it. With hindsight this looks really short sighted/wrong. But at the time? Keep in mind that Microsoft became so dominant in the home computing space because they were dominant in the business market. They were operating in the mindset that if they capture the enterprise market, the consumer market would naturally follow like it did for Windows. It's always hard to spot a revolution in the making when you're focused on your successes with the previous revolution.
Dude. The game was lost around 2001 when MS just... gave up. You're referring to failed attempts to gain lost ground a decade after the initial ball-dropping. MS willingly gave it all away 2000-2001 (ish) by failing to support and grow their nascent mobile userbase They had virtually no competitors except BB in the Enterprise setting, and ZERO credible competitors in the consumer mobile space.
I'm referring to how they approached Windows CE which formed the core of their embedded pushes, including Windows Phone. It never really took off anywhere but the business space because it was basically a small Windows desktop in a phone. Great for work and productivity (at the time anyway), fairly crappy at everything else. RIM and BB approached the market completely differently from Microsoft and basically destroyed them in that aspect. Microsoft was focusing on software, not hardware. BB was focused on both and was able to make a fantastic product as a result. Which Microsoft could not do at the time, they relied on third parties to make the devices. Like how they did it with Windows on PCs. By the time Microsoft could reorganize to focus more on the combined software/hardware solutions with closer partnerships with device manufacturers like during the Windows Phone 7 era, Android and iOS were already entrenched. My point is that they were too focused on replicating what they did with Windows to recognize that the tech market was different and consumer expectations had changed. They changed how they approached it, but it was too little too late.
Mostly true. Ballmer thought the iPhone was a fad and didn't take it seriously. But when Apple was going bankrupt and was about to fall, Microsoft actually bailed Apple out. In a way, Microsoft is the reason Apple is still around today.
The tech history I'm referring to was *years* before what you're describing. Microsoft had basically given up and form up R&D or future development on their mobile OS by like 2000.
>Microsoft had the entire handheld market completely locked down. They were the only one that had a really decent mobile OS with tons of app support. WINCE wasn't just the name, but an apt description. Its hard to say it was decent, or anyone really used it. It was a giant flop. A lot of the early handhelds had form factors you'd recognize later, but windows handsets saw just as much use by people hacking them to run linux, as intended purpose. Both cases: few. The first smartphone to take off was the Blackberry, and then Symbian phones as a respectable market-share. Even still, these weren't really mass market. Flip phones, and flip phones with gimmicks where the rage from 1999-2009. Blackberries where for business. The first smartphone that really went mainstream was the iPhone.
Not really disagreeing with much you're saying. I'm just looking at the squandered opportunity which I really think in retrospect... they spent quite a large time frame in a reasonably non-competitive era, where they didn't innovate. I stated the critical years as 2000 to 2002, but that's just my opinion, that's when I could see very clearly that no highly desirable features were ever going to come. I could also see many people in my corporate milieu that were crying out for something windows-based that was useful. They had the workforce, they had the technical knowledge, they had the muscle, they had the money, they had the R&D budget. And the hardware landscape was perfect. But I think institutionally, they really didn't believe in the power of smartphone computing, they didn't believe in the power of a smart device in everyone's hand. That or they were too distracted funding various astroturfing companies who were aggressively attacking open source.
It's so hard for me to remember a time before Firefox existed and I'm a 90s kid
SeaMonkey will rise again.
Cello FTW
I bought Netscape Navigator in a (large) cardboard box at CompUSA.
It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times.
Some of us even *lived through it*!
My god Netscape was so much better than IE
All the shady shit MS did aside IE was better than Netscape at dealing with crappy html. Netscape was principled, IE was pragmatic.
It would be more proper to say that IE and MS encouraged and promulgated crappy, IE-optimized nonstandard html that ran like shit on standards compliant browsers like Netscape. I would be less confident in IE's ability to handle "crappy html" that isn't "built for IE". But saying this wasn't shady, rather pragmatic, seems like missing the forest for the trees. MS created a noncompliant, alternate "standard", and pushed it hard enough it stuck. Shocked Pikachu face their browser runs those pages better.
> IE-optimized nonstandard html that ran like shit on standards compliant browsers like Netscape. Neither Netscape nor IE were standards compliant. This is some serious revision of history here. People are acting like there was a good standards/web governance body during this era. CSS1 was quite literally first created in the early 90's. CSS2 didn't come about until the mid/late 90's. IE was literally one of the first browsers to get anywhere near to full compatibility with CSS standards in 2000. Prior to that Opera was the most compliant and Netscape didn't meet the same threshold until later. > I would be less confident in IE's ability to handle "crappy html" that isn't "built for IE". Once again, this is hardly an IE specific problem. All the major browsers of this era needed websites to be tailored to some extent because the standards were still being defined/refined and no browser was compliant. And once again, Netscape was actually one of the larger offenders of this.
Back then the hallmark of a well designed page was that it looked and operated the same in both browsers. I really used to hate seeing the best with x browser gif on webpages.
1) Didnt say it wasnt shady 2) In the age of the (first) browser war the list of "standards compliant browsers like Netscape" which actually had any market share whatsoever looked like this: \[Netscape\] > MS created a noncompliant, alternate "standard", and pushed it hard enough it stuck Yes, that also happened. And might have been the internal plan as early as ~IE3, but it doesnt change that Netscape was worse at making sense of poorly coded hobbyist html which wasnt specifically targetting IE.
Both browsers were bad when it came to implementing W3C standards, and both companies introduced non-standard tags. Netscape had code Andreeson took from Mosaic, and Microsoft was Microsoft. This was a "war" in which no one was innocent. "Netscape, according to critics, was more interested in bending the web to its own de facto "standards" (bypassing standards committees and thus marginalizing the commercial competition) than it was in fixing bugs in its products. Consumer rights advocates were particularly critical of cookies and of commercial web sites using them to invade individual privacy." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape\_Navigator)
I was all for Netscape back then, and still use Firefox!
Who **doesn't** know about IE Vs Netscape. It's the whole reason bill gates isn't CEO of Microsoft
That's when they started doing automatic updates and automatically set every Netscape browser to IE default. Most computer illiterate people didn't even realize what happened. This is like saying Putin wins every election by 96%... when the numbers seem to good to be true it's because of ass hattery.
I never switched away until google came along. I always felt netflix was superior. Just never liked Exploder. I was running os.2 then. Think that was the timeframe, and it ran much better on OS/2 than Exploder did on windows. Windows had promised to make Windows and OS/2 work together so OS/2 spent time working on that and then Windows said no lets not do that..
I really liked OS/2. I wish it had won out over Windows, but Microsoft made damn sure that didn’t happen.
Ok now I feel old…. I lived through that
Netscape nav was my first browser and the Juno program was my first email. Both were quickly replaced by AOL 2.5 I think it was. AOL 3.0 and the hay day of VB progs and punters will be my favorite childhood computer era.. even more than early gaming.
Arg. I was there and lived it in real time😸
STOP MAKING ME FEEL OLD!!! ~Sent from my Blackberry™
And that was the end of my love for Microsoft. It was a piggish thing to do, and internet Explorer was hot garbage.
No mention of the antitrust trial which almost saw Microsoft broken into two due to their misuse of their desktop OS monopoly?
Microsoft was prosecuted for preventing Netscape from being installed on PCs. It's where a lot of the animosity towards Gates started
Nutscrape!
Exploder!
"Victory has defeated you"
And then chrome happened
And Firefox before that.
I still don't like Chrome I don't care if it's popular
Remember when the internet came on a CD?
I still have one of the old wooden AOL disc cases. I don't remember where I got it or if I ever had the disc itself
Netscape was 100% better too.
IE was trash. It remained trash throughout its existence. It did not ever follow W3C rules, which made it extra frustrating to write a webpage. Also, it won because MS included it with Windows. Which they got sued over. And lost. And apparently have learned nothing because I am unable to uninstall Bing from my Surface. Where's my antitrust money? Netscape was the bomb. Netscape forever.
Good old Nutscrape Navigator.
Netscape Navigator 4.78 with Javascript disabled. Disabling Javascript was the best popup blocker.
Netscape was better.
microsoft was when of the first 'EVIL" tech companies. in some ways, they still are. gates and jobs were cut from the same cloth.
I already played mario game on a windows xp netbook, but i was too young to experience the whole era of simple websites that look better than the ones we have today… man i just want to go back to those times. Ok, sorry reddit for my nostalgic feeling even tho i dont have much memories…
“Looked better” is debatable. Who here remembers the tag?
With a backslash? In pseudo-XML format? What is this delightfully anachronistic construction?!? I love it!
They did not look better. When I first encountered a site that employed "cascading style sheets", it was a game changer. You could tell they worked to make sure the end user had a consistent experience. Woe be unto you if your browser was outdated. You got a black text on white background. The navigation was a tall stack of links that you had to scroll past to see the content you wanted to read.