Back in the mid-90s, there was the Great Browser War between Microsoft and Netscape. Newsweek devoted a cover story to it, if I recall correctly, with quotes from Bill Gates that the outcome of the browser war could determine the fate of Microsoft, etc. And there were the anti-trust suits against Microsoft, based on complaints by Netscape, and so on.
Well, Netscape’s gone, and Microsoft’s survived, but the market has produced several other browsers: Safari, Firefox, Google Chrome, and probably others that I don’t know about. Internet Explorer doesn’t seem that popular, at least not with Dopers.
So, was it all hype? Did the fate of the internet (and world domination by MS) really hinge on which browser the masses used?
IE still has something like 70% market share, so its still plenty popular.
I share your puzzlement on how much effort went into the browser wars though, why all the millions of dollars spent to control the market for a product that, so far as I recall, both sides were giving away for free.
As I recall (I followed the story somewhat, but not too closely), Microsoft was sued because they included IE with Windows, and integrated IE into Windows in a way that Netscape couldn’t, not having access to Windows source code. Netscape sued, and MS was ordered to separate Windows and IE. Microsoft claimed they IE was so closely integrated into Windows that they’d have to rewrite millions of lines of code to make it a separate program. The judge was an idiot and told MS that he went into his “add/remove programs” and deleted IE. MS appealed, and that’s pretty much when I stopped following the case.
You are correct that IE is not that popular here, but then again, we tend to be above average intelligence here
Seriously, Firefox is pretty popular among knowledgeable computer users, but most non computer literate people still use IE just because it’s included, and they don’t have the knowledge or the inclination to use anything else. On the surface, there’s really not that much difference between the two. The biggest thing about Firefox (for me) was the browser tabs, guess what feature is in the new IE?
Netscape was not free. It had more than a nominal cost, $39.95 or maybe $59.95, enough so that people had to want it to plunk down the money. Microsoft countered with a “free” browser that was actually paid for as part of the OS. On the surface, this looked to me to be a good example of predatory pricing.
I still remember all the style and design experts back around 1995 to 1997 telling everyone that they had to design websites for Netscape and thinking that they were idiots, since given the choice between a free browser and one that you had to pay for, Netscape would shortly have the market share of Apple. And lo it came to be.
That was a major reason why Microsoft became the Death Star in the eyes of so many. It ruined a company and a product that most people preferred. More than a decade later it still has no real competition, the increased popularity of Firefox not withstanding.
Most individual users have no conception of how strong a hold Microsoft and all its products have over the business world, which is why its market shares of everything from that era is so fantastically high. IE is still the world’s default browser.
Life took funny bounces since. Microsoft has not won any new markets since. That may be cosmic retribution or internal stupidity. A generation of people have grown up with the net not paying much if any attention to Microsoft products other than perhaps the OS. In the 1990s, however, whether Microsoft would control everything was the only computer question that meant anything, and the browser war was the public symbol of that.
Britannica offered an encyclopedia that was essentially a set of clickable .htm pages. This posed a threat to MS’s business model: if applications migrated to the browser, it wouldn’t matter what OS you had.
So it was in MS’s interest to put a spike into common .html standards and provide a free and reasonably clunky implementation of this htm reader. Netscape’s attempt to have a common browser across all OS platforms had to be stopped.
I’m not sure whether this theory really holds water though or how much of a real threat was posed by Netscape. But see this wiki page under “Early Years”: Netscape - Wikipedia
Incidentally, Netscape’s code evolved into Firefox, currently used by millions.
Well, if you wanted to I suppose you could make an argument that MS spent a fortune ensuring that all the web2.0/cloud stuff arrived a decade later than it would otherwise have. Meaning, another decade invested in the cruft, legacy systems and intertia that prevent companies moving from the MS-powered PC to a generic ‘browser-machine’ running whatever is cheapest and most reliable to access web apps running on whatever is the cheapest and most reliable server.
It’s all a bit academic, sort of alternative tech history. If MS hadn’t killed Netscape, would the world now mainly be using Netscape 10 running on NetBSD, to access something like Borland WebOffice running on mainframes, for a tenth of the total cost of the current MS Windows/Office model? Would Lycos have morphed into a Googlealike? Who knows, but it might have happened. Maybe.
Microsoft switched almost overnight from indifference to this new-fangled “web” thing, to a completely over-the-top, Oh My God Everything Will Run In Web Browsers From Now On attitude. Witness the preposterous Active Desktop that they slapped on to Windows 98, and which everybody promptly switched off.
So for a couple of years they had this attitude that if you could run a browser in any old operating system you liked, they were screwed. In the long run, they were probably right, but they underestimated the timescale drastically. I mean, nowadays, you can sorta kinda do most things in a web browser. But people still seem to like having full-blown OSes and the heavyweight apps that they support.
You mean with Internet Explorer, of course? - Microsoft has won vast markets since, in other areas, such as directory services, messaging, collaboration platforms, etc.
Had Microsoft ultimately won the browser wars and reached near 100% usage, it could have meant the end of open web content standards. Instead of HTML we’d be using (fictitious) IEML, which would be a closed format and you’d have to pay $500 to MS for “IE development studio”.
This would have had a chilling effect on use of the web in education as well as garage-company startups on a shoestring budget, who could afford a text editor but not a development studio.
Firefox is a direct descendant of Netscape in some sense (see Mozilla - Wikipedia), so it didn’t entirely go away. Of course, a lot of water has gone over the dam in the meantime.
I never did understand why it was important to MS to “win” a war over free software and I still don’t.
The main problem caused by the browser war was the uncertainty about standards for the web developers - plug-ins no longer worked on IE, other webpages worked only on iE. It was a pain in the ass.
At the time the concept of the “Net computer” was still very much alive - Larry Ellison went so far as to say that a PC with installations of software on its own hard drive was “stupid” and would soon be dead. That turned out to to be not such a great prediction but that is what people were thinking the computer would turn into.
And just to be the contrarian, I’ve tried Firefox and I disliked it. I prefer IE.
Some of us still do. I want my data on my local computer where it’s accessible to me regardless of whether the network is up or down.
Since the one fundamental law of the universe is Murphy’s, it’s occurred way too often in my life that I’ll have a desperate project that needs to get done yesterday, and the only way I can get it done is via a web-based application, and that’s the very moment that the network crashes and simply can’t be brought up until the deadline for my project is past.
Whereas, I’ve NEVER had to wait for my local copy of Excel to come back online.
It’s interesting that the one browser that continued to charge for its software back during the browser wars is still going strong: Opera. Which is clearly the most innovative browser out there (Firefox cribs all its best ideas from them). Alas, no one designs for it, so there can be problems.
Netscape started out charging; if you got it free that was because it was paid for by your ISP. Once MSIE came along, they realized they had to give it away, too, and it wrecked havoc with their business.
