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What if Netscape had won?

Time: 07:21 EST/12:21 GMT | News Source: CNET | Posted By: Bill Roach

It's anniversary season in Silicon Valley. When March 10 rolled around, the San Francisco Bay Area's media dutifully marked the three-year anniversary of the peak of the Internet frenzy with the usual menu of "then and now" stories. Truth be told, it was a date few people in this region--let alone the wider computer industry--cared to fix in their calendars.

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#1 By 6859 (206.156.242.36) at Friday, March 14, 2003 09:24:49 AM

*sigh* Not this again... Ok, look MS went to Netscape Corporation before Windows 95 was to ship and asked Netscape if they could package Netscape (version 3.0 I think) with Win95. Netscape, shortsightedly said no. MS *needed* a browser, so they wrote a piece of crap called Internet Explorer 3.0, and the universe was appalled. That browser (IE) sucked. (But it got better. A whole lot better, but that's later.) Netscape at first was unimpressed, after all they controlled the graphical web browser market lock-stock-and barrel. If you recall some versions of Netscape Navigator cost $70 a pop. That's gall for you, charging for software (LOL).

It wasn't until IE 4 that Netscape began to see the problem with "their lack of vision" (thanks to Darth Vader for that quote.) The rest is history.

In short: Netscape messed up. IE was born (and took over) and Netscape whined all the way to the Attorney General and the rest of the US Governement that would listen. "WAAAAAH! We're stupid, we didn't realize the opportunity we had! WAAAH! Help us against Microsoft! WAAAAHHH!"

Sad, but true. Netscape is the ultimate author of their own demise. I have no sympathy.

#2 By 6859 (206.156.242.36) at Friday, March 14, 2003 10:55:16 AM

gg, to be fair you can't beat IE's startup time because once the OS loads more than half od IE is already in memory. But yeah, I agree. IE 6 is excellent, Mozilla still has a bit to go, and Netscape Navigator needs to be ignored.

#3 By 20 (67.9.179.51) at Friday, March 14, 2003 05:56:34 PM

There's nothing particularly bad about the current state of browser technology--that is if you are frozen in a time warp, circa 1999. But for the rest of the Internet-surfing inhabitants of planet Earth, Netscape these days survives as a desolate outpost in the vast AOL Time Warner empire, something akin to banishment to Irkutsk.
Internet browser design stopped being interesting years ago. That's simply because Microsoft no longer faces any challenge that forces it to innovate

BZZZZ wrong.

a.) Netscape hadn't changed its browser at all while it was sitting on the throne. It went from bad to worse in 4.x and just kept declining while MS IE went from 2.x, 3.x, 4.x, and 5.x
Now, even you staunch ABMers must admit that there was marked improvement from IE 2 to 5. Whether you think IE is good or not, it certainly has improved while Netscape had gone nowhere. Even now it uses Mozilla because it couldn't produce Netscape 5.x.

b.) because Microsoft no longer faces any challenge Oh God, not this BS again. Give me a break. There's plenty of challenges. But let's examine the facts:

1.) Every time MS tries to innovate, the world scremes bloody murder.
2.) There's only so much that you can do to improve rendering markup to the screen and the saturation limit has been met. The only thing left to do now would be something more active like Flash. And if MS tried that (remember, they did, actually... remember Corona?), then they'd get sued for competing with Macromedia.

The fact is, MS CAN'T innovate in these areas because when it does, there's AOL/Netscape/CNN/Time/TimeWarner/WarnerBros to throw the book at them and bog MS down in 5-year, multi-million dollar court cases.

The biggest innovation that has been introduced to the web recently is Flash. Tabbed Browsing is a dud, IMHO and won't catch with the masses. Pop-up filtering is going to be in the next versions, from what I understand, so that's taken care of, but seriously, what more revolutionary things are there to do?

Perhaps the largest change I can see is to get rid of the ghastly abortion that is JavaScript and get a real, full, rich Object-Oriented scripting language for the browser (based on .NET please!! :)

But then you have to deal with the "Other" guys like Mozilla who move like a 3-toed Sloth on valium, not to mention the W3C which trails behind it panting like an old man.

So MS is stuck between being the "big mean evil guy trying to drive out competition" and being the "big mean evil guy who has no competition and sits on his pile of gold not innovating"

You ABMers can't have it both ways and you have to reconcile your duplicitousness soon or MS is going to revolutionize the web and leave everyone else out.

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