# What were the browser wars of the 1990s? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [January 20, 2020, 5:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-browser-wars-of-the-1990s/846709 "2020-01-20T17:23:34Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Francis\_Vaughan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/francis_vaughan/32/3093_2.png) [@Francis\_Vaughan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Francis_Vaughan)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2020, 1:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-browser-wars-of-the-1990s/846709/21 "2020-01-22T01:26:16Z")
You really need to have been there at the time. As mentioned above, it wasn’t about the browser, it was about control of the ecosystem. Fast forward to today and you can see where Microsoft wanted to get to - they are called Facebook and Google. One of the other land-grabs was single sign on. Microsoft pushed hard on that one. Nowadays how many sites give you the option to sign on with Google or Facebook? MS lost that one too. There was a feeling back then (and I shared it) that the browser paradigm was more important than just the Web, and that the core idea had the potential to take over the desktop paradigm and application interface paradigms. I’m sure MS though there was legs in this. It is still true, but it has taken until HTML5 to get the tools into any sort of shape. Which is why adding the core libraries to the OS does make sense. (Folders and desktop is so 1970’s) Netscape felt they were in danger of being wiped out, and that would have left the Unix world in serious trouble. This was a long game play by MS. They viewed control of the browser market as leverage towards control of much more. Removing this control, even if IE remained the dominant browser was the key part of the war. ---
**Author:** ![iamthewalrus\_3](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/258eb7/32.png) [@iamthewalrus\_3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iamthewalrus_3)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2020, 2:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-browser-wars-of-the-1990s/846709/22 "2020-01-22T02:43:17Z")
> [@Francis\_Vaughan](#): > > You really need to have been there at the time. I _was_ there at the time. I was on the internet before the web. I have run every major version of Windows since 3.1 (except, I think, ME). And I generally agreed at the time. But now I don’t. Because we have more information now and we should use that information to reexamine our previous beliefs. What I’m saying is that looking how technology played out, I think I was wrong. Because Microsoft _didn’t_ manage to parlay their desktop dominance into all those new markets. Yeah, IE was the top browser for a while because heavy-handedness. But, honestly, not for very long. And it lost out to _better_ browsers. Google beat Microsoft at search because it was better. Apple beat Microsoft at phones because they were better. _Most_ cases where a tech giant tries to squash a competitor through sheer force of leaning on their existing dominant market fail, and they do so at fairly ruinous expense to the tech giant (See: Bing, Google+, Windows phone (the not-as-sucky one post iPhone)) and the conclusion I draw from that is that it’s a lot harder to turn market dominance in one area into dominance in another one in tech. That wasn’t obvious in the 90s, but it is now. ---
**Author:** ![Saint\_Cad](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/saint_cad/32/18907_2.png) [@Saint\_Cad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Saint_Cad)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2020, 3:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-browser-wars-of-the-1990s/846709/23 "2020-01-22T03:26:09Z")
> [@iamthewalrus\_3](#): > > In retrospect, history has totally vindicated Microsoft here. Can you imagine an OS shipping without a built-in web browser? I used chameleon so yes, yes I can. ---
**Author:** ![echoreply](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/echoreply/32/3641_2.png) [@echoreply](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/echoreply)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2020, 3:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-browser-wars-of-the-1990s/846709/24 "2020-01-22T03:48:16Z")
> [@iamthewalrus\_3](#): > > Aren’t those statements kind of contradictory? I mean, if computers won’t sell without Windows, then having to pay a license for all computers seems more like a way of keeping OEMs from not actually paying for all the windows licenses they used (which was a real problem in those days) than it was of nefarious actions. The object was to prevent OEMs from even taking a risk on alternative operating systems. No OEM could afford to alienate Microsoft; pay the full price for Windows; or sell computers without Windows, but that they’d still paid for a Windows license on. So if you wanted to run OS/2 on a store bought (or mail order) computer the only choice was to get it with Windows, then buy OS/2 and install it yourself. (Yes, there were a few exceptions, but saying that something is only 95% of the market pretty much confirms it’s a monopoly.) > [@iamthewalrus\_3](#): > > I _was_ there at the time. I was on the internet before the web. I have run every major version of Windows since 3.1 (except, I think, ME). And I generally agreed at the time. But now I don’t. Because we have more information now and we should use that information to reexamine our previous beliefs. > > What I’m saying is that looking how technology played out, I think I was wrong. Because Microsoft _didn’t_ manage to parlay their desktop dominance into all those new markets. Yeah, IE was the top browser for a while because heavy-handedness. But, honestly, not for very long. And it lost out to _better_ browsers. Google beat Microsoft at search because it was better. Apple beat Microsoft at phones because they were better. _Most_ cases where a tech giant tries to squash a competitor through sheer force of leaning on their existing dominant market fail, and they do so at fairly ruinous expense to the tech giant (See: Bing, Google+, Windows phone (the not-as-sucky one post iPhone)) and the conclusion I draw from that is that it’s a lot harder to turn market dominance in one area into dominance in another one in tech. That wasn’t obvious in the 90s, but it is now. I see a key difference, I was there at the time, too, and I was not running any version of Windows. I was running every alternative OS to Windows I could find, from OS/2 to commercial Unixes, Pre-X MacOS, and finally Linux. Saying in hindsight that none of the dire predictions about Microsoft came true, is a bit like saying that none of the Y2K predictions came true. In Y2K lots of people worked very hard to prevent the predictions from coming true. In Microsoft’s case, we only have the world in which they moderated their behavior as a result of the trial. Perhaps if they’d been left to run at full tilt under the direction of a competent monopolist, Bill Gates, the world would look very different than it does today. Earlier that decade Gates had managed to crush WordPerfect and Lotus 123 by parlaying Windows dominance into application dominance. Google didn’t beat Microsoft in search, Google beat Digital’s Alta Vista. Microsoft was busy messing around with MSN to take out AOL. Apple is not a monopoly, so the rules are different. Yes, smart phones are a duopoly at the moment, but there is an alternative to Apple. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2020, 7:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-browser-wars-of-the-1990s/846709/25 "2020-01-22T07:19:52Z")
> [@Telemark](#): > > Because you need some way to download Chrome. Yes. It’s called wget. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2020, 7:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-browser-wars-of-the-1990s/846709/26 "2020-01-22T07:29:21Z")
> [@iamthewalrus\_3](#): > > I mean, yes, but you can read that as malicious (as the Justice Department did) or as benign. The benign reading is that Microsoft saw that people were going to need a browser and that including that functionality in their bundle of services would make Windows a better product that would make more people buy it. > > This is _really common_ in software, and Microsoft is basically the only one who ever got punished for it. You used to have to buy separate software to compress and decompress files. Now Windows just does it. You used to have to buy separate software to decode and play certain types of media. Now Windows just does it. You used to have to buy separate software to change the color temperature of your monitor when the sun goes down. Now iOS (and I think Android?) just include that feature. For the most part, people don’t buy Windows, Computer OEMs buy Windows. Unless you build your own machine, if you want to run Linux you do it on a machine that ships with Windows. You are right about the auxiliary programs. Microsoft destroyed a whole bunch of companies trying to make a living on this kind of stuff. They could do it thanks to their monopoly power. Now you can usually either use what is shipped or download open source equivalents, all free. (To the end user.) > [@](#): > > I’m not sure I buy the argument that users don’t care about these things, either. Sure, if you ask users if they want html email, many of them will have no idea what you’re talking about, but almost everyone uses html email these days. Any modern OS that shipped with an email client (and, yes, every OS should ship with a built-in email client) that didn’t support html email would be rightly and roundly derided. > > So if you buy the idea that today an OS should ship with this kind of support and they didn’t used to, it seems hard to make the argument that the specific point at which Microsoft added that support was anticompetitive and not just building the future of operating systems we know today. I never said that users didn’t care about these things. Back then there was a large perceived hurdle to them getting software not included with the computer. I know - I installed tons of packages for people too nervous to do it themselves. I don’t think that’s too common today. > [@](#): > > I think you might be using a different definition for “part of the OS”. You can get along fine without using a window manager too, but that doesn’t make it not part of the OS. The OS that Microsoft sells is a massive bundle of different pieces of software, and they decided to include a browser in that bundle. Also, according to Microsoft, they made technical decisions in the design that caused code to be shared between the browser and other components of the OS. I taught operating systems, (long before there was a Windows) so I might have a more rigorous definition of operating system. Throwing stuff into the distribution doesn’t make it a part of the OS. Windows used to ship with solitaire - was solitaire part of the OS. By browser I mean the internet surfing part which Netscape made. IE adapted to be a file manager is a part of the OS, but reusing some code from program X in the OS doesn’t make the entire program a part of the OS. > [@](#): > > Again, you can read those decisions as malicious: MS didn’t really need to tightly tie their browser code into other code, they did it to make a fake legal argument that they couldn’t pull the browser. But that kind of thing happens for non-nefarious reasons all the time in software. Once you have a bit of code that does something, it’s very easy for other places where you need to do that thing to just use the code that exists. If you look at Microsofts source in general, I expect that this is common and had nothing to do with any legal arguments they might have needed to make. See above. I read a rather large book on the case. Nefarious, malicious yes. Illegal, maybe. Good for the industry. Probably. There was a story in Analog, before Windows and the de facto PC standard, which gave a world with cars that couldn’t drive on all roads or fill up at all gas stations as an analogy to the fragmented computer environment before the IBM PC. ---
**Author:** ![lingyi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/d2c977/32.png) [@lingyi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lingyi)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2020, 7:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-browser-wars-of-the-1990s/846709/27 "2020-01-22T07:36:15Z")
I did web design for a couple of local political campaigns in the early 2000’s and it was a major PITA making sure everything I did was compatible with both Internet Explorer and Netscape. No browser check/autoswitch/alternate layout allowed since that may lead to “What are you trying to hide with two versions of the webpage?”. I also had to make sure that the page loaded as quickly as possible on even the slowest dialup. I used a program that you could dial in simulated latency down to 14.4K for testing. Even worse was when I had to make a webpage for a public elementary school. Full ADA compliance required. The site didn’t look great, but hey, it was compliant. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2020, 7:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-browser-wars-of-the-1990s/846709/28 "2020-01-22T07:39:40Z")
> [@iamthewalrus\_3](#): > > I also think it’s notable that no one pays for web browsers these days. For a long time Opera was paid software, but I can’t figure out how to buy anything from them these days. Are there any paid web browsers left? One interpretation of this is that Microsoft so crushed Netflix that they changed the course of software history, but I think that’s wrong. I think the conclusion that we should draw is that browsers were inevitably going to become part of the basic bundled functionality included by operating systems. The arc of software development is long, but it bends toward free. The reason browsers are free it that enough of them are made by companies that have good business reasons to make them free or are open source that any competitor that isn’t free would soon die unless it had some tremendous advantage. > [@](#): > > Aren’t those statements kind of contradictory? I mean, if computers won’t sell without Windows, then having to pay a license for all computers seems more like a way of keeping OEMs from not actually paying for all the windows licenses they used (which was a real problem in those days) than it was of nefarious actions. What if an OEM wanted to try to sell an OS/2 machine or a Linux machine? They basically couldn’t effectively since they would be paying for Windows licenses they wouldn’t be using. Lots of machines can be ordered with Office, but the OEMs don’t have to buy licenses for all machines. Microsoft can track this just fine. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2020, 7:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-browser-wars-of-the-1990s/846709/29 "2020-01-22T07:41:01Z")
> [@lingyi](#): > > I did web design for a couple of local political campaigns in the early 2000’s and it was a major PITA making sure everything I did was compatible with both Internet Explorer and Netscape. No browser check/autoswitch/alternate layout allowed since that may lead to “What are you trying to hide with two versions of the webpage?”. I also had to make sure that the page loaded as quickly as possible on even the slowest dialup. I used a program that you could dial in simulated latency down to 14.4K for testing. > > Even worse was when I had to make a webpage for a public elementary school. Full ADA compliance required. The site didn’t look great, but hey, it was compliant. I have a somewhat old HTML book, and for each tag there are standard options and IE options. I used to run into many website that broke for anything but IE - that was the only reason I ever used it. ---
**Author:** ![bump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7c8e57/32.png) [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2020, 2:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-browser-wars-of-the-1990s/846709/30 "2020-01-22T14:08:11Z")
> [@iamthewalrus\_3](#): > > In retrospect, history has totally vindicated Microsoft here. Can you imagine an OS shipping without a built-in web browser? It’s just part of the bundle of basic software that we expect to be included in any OS these days. > > And this tactic is now just normal operation for any OS maker. When a 3rd party utility proves to be useful, it very often makes its way into the default distribution of a future OS release. Chicken or egg? I’d argue that today, on PCs at least, nobody actually expects to use IE or the execrable Edge, and assumes they’ll be installing Chrome or Firefox, which is sort of the reanimated corpse of Netscape. On smartphones, sure. But that’s not quite the same equation. Just because OS makers do that, it doesn’t make it right. In some cases, they’re absolutely right- the old stuff that was third-party in the DOS/Win 3 days like memory managers, caching software, TCP/IP stacks, etc… SHOULD have been part of the OS from the beginning, as they’re core OS functionality and that was an oversight on Microsoft’s part with DOS (and was mostly rectified with Windows 95). But others are clearly applications and NOT operating system components- browsers, editors, etc… and I’ve always though it particularly shitty of Microsoft to essentially wreck those markets instead of actually you know, competing with those companies. Where do you draw that line? Why is it ok to call IE/Edge “part of the OS” and not the Office tools? I suspect the line is where MS thinks they can make more money vs. where they think they can’t. ---
**Author:** ![amarinth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/3be4f8/32.png) [@amarinth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/amarinth)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2020, 4:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-browser-wars-of-the-1990s/846709/31 "2020-01-22T16:34:24Z")
> [@dalej42](#): > > I remember hearing about browser wars and dot com companies making millions back in the 1990s. Did internet companies then care about me using Netscape or Internet Explorer? Microsoft & Netscape certainly did. Also, a lot of web pages were thrown together by people who were trying things out (and copying and pasting stuff they’d seen) and not looking at or using standards. And because of different levels of fault tolerance in the different browsers or features added to one browser and not the other, it was very easy to add a line of html that would display fine in one browser and look like a garbled mess in another (often because it wasn’t standard html or was less than perfect html in the wrong way.) Designers would also exploit bad html to get a specific effect on a specific browser. (Frames. You could do so many beautiful and horrible things with frames - both intentionally and unintentionally) A couple of other things to remember - IE wasn’t the dominant browser in the 1990s, it only got the highest market share in the 2000s and more importantly _after_ the anti-trust suit. And it only stayed there for a few years, it was pretty quickly overtaken. ---
**Author:** ![iamthewalrus\_3](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/258eb7/32.png) [@iamthewalrus\_3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iamthewalrus_3)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2020, 5:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-browser-wars-of-the-1990s/846709/32 "2020-01-22T17:55:47Z")
> [@echoreply](#): > > Saying in hindsight that none of the dire predictions about Microsoft came true, is a bit like saying that none of the Y2K predictions came true. In Y2K lots of people worked very hard to prevent the predictions from coming true. In Microsoft’s case, we only have the world in which they moderated their behavior as a result of the trial. Perhaps if they’d been left to run at full tilt under the direction of a competent monopolist, Bill Gates, the world would look very different than it does today. Earlier that decade Gates had managed to crush WordPerfect and Lotus 123 by parlaying Windows dominance into application dominance. Sure, but we have more than just Microsoft to look at. Google tried to use their search dominance to beat Facebook in social networking. Didn’t work. Weirdly enough, lots of companies have tried to unseat Office with free alternatives, but Office continues to be huge! Which is at least some evidence that Office is actually pretty good software (I don’t have enough personal experience with it back then to say, but I will say that modern Excel is _way_ better than any alternatives I’ve used). > [@](#): > > Google didn’t beat Microsoft in search, Google beat Digital’s Alta Vista. I think that’s a distinction without relevance. My point is that lots of companies made it past the Microsoft juggernaut. The fact that Microsoft wasn’t even focused on the ways in which they were being outcompeted until it was too late supports my point. > [@Voyager](#): > > I never said that users didn’t care about these things. No, you didn’t. That was sloppy formatting by me. Someone else said it and I was responding to them without direct quoting. > [@](#): > > I taught operating systems, (long before there was a Windows) so I might have a more rigorous definition of operating system. Throwing stuff into the distribution doesn’t make it a part of the OS. Windows used to ship with solitaire - was solitaire part of the OS. I’m a software developer, so I also know what the technical definition of an OS is, but that’s not how most people see it. Most people see _everything_, including Solitaire, that’s part of the standard distribution as part of the OS. Solitaire’s obviously not an _essential_ part of the OS in the sense that the computer will fall over and fail to boot if it’s not there, but it might be an essential thing to some customer. Bundles are good. Speaking of Solitaire, do you think that the justice department should have forced Microsoft to remove it so that rival computer game companies would have a better market for their programs? Why or why not? > [@Voyager](#): > > The reason browsers are free it that enough of them are made by companies that have good business reasons to make them free or are open source that any competitor that isn’t free would soon die unless it had some tremendous advantage. Right, I understand that. Do you think that in a parallel universe where Microsoft didn’t give IE away for free, we’d still be paying for browsers? Or would basically the same thing have happened, and lots of other companies and open source groups would be giving them away? I think it’d be the latter. I think maybe Netscape would have lasted a _little_ longer, but something as basic and necessary to the modern use of a computer as a browser would not exist as paid software for very long. So from our vantage point now, where we saw that browsers are basically destined to be free software, it’s really hard for me to look at Microsoft, who first gave them away, as a bad guy. Netscape was doomed no matter what. It happened a little bit faster than it might have and we didn’t have to waste our money on browser licenses. Win/win! > [@bump](#): > > Just because OS makers do that, it doesn’t make it right. In some cases, they’re absolutely right- the old stuff that was third-party in the DOS/Win 3 days like memory managers, caching software, TCP/IP stacks, etc… SHOULD have been part of the OS from the beginning, as they’re core OS functionality and that was an oversight on Microsoft’s part with DOS (and was mostly rectified with Windows 95). > > But others are clearly applications and NOT operating system components- browsers, editors, etc… and I’ve always though it particularly shitty of Microsoft to essentially wreck those markets instead of actually you know, competing with those companies. > > Where do you draw that line? Why is it ok to call IE/Edge “part of the OS” and not the Office tools? I suspect the line is where MS thinks they can make more money vs. where they think they can’t. I think that you draw the line wherever the software seller wants to draw it. Because there’s no solid _technical_ place to draw the line. Again, there are OSes that ship without window managers. Clearly a GUI isn’t a core part of the OS. But it would be just as absurd to force Microsoft to ship a text-only OS and offer a variety of window managers for people to choose from as it is to force them not to ship a browser. And if Microsoft wants to ship a free first person shooter, industrial database, or streaming subscription for free in the next version of Windows, that’s bad for Epic, Oracle, or Netflix (this time I actually mean Netflix), but _good_ for us. ---
**Author:** ![Fiendish\_Astronaut](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fiendish_astronaut/32/3295_2.png) [@Fiendish\_Astronaut](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fiendish_Astronaut)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2020, 6:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-browser-wars-of-the-1990s/846709/33 "2020-01-22T18:44:09Z")
I saw this interesting video recently that is basically a graph as it moves through time showing the popularity of the internet browsers from 1996 to mid-2019. I just hunted it down again: [Most Popular Internet Browsers 1996 - 2019 - YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zc9Oy_zdEwc) Fascinating to see Internet Explorer had 96.8% of the market in Q2 of 2004. What a powerful position they held. It’s less than 5% now. ---
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2020, 7:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-browser-wars-of-the-1990s/846709/34 "2020-01-22T19:12:07Z")
> [@Fiendish\_Astronaut](#): > > I saw this interesting video recently that is basically a graph as it moves through time showing the popularity of the internet browsers from 1996 to mid-2019. I just hunted it down again: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zc9Oy\_zdEwc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zc9Oy_zdEwc) > > Fascinating to see Internet Explorer had 96.8% of the market in Q2 of 2004. What a powerful position they held. It’s less than 5% now. That is a fascinating video, and interesting to see how new technologies can really take over old, established technologies that quickly. I’m also a bit surprised at how many people use Opera. I used it for a spell back when it was 0.2% of the market back in 2000. What was it about Firefox that so quickly propelled it up to the second most-used browser a year after its introduction? Before it enters the fray, we have IE, Netscape Navigator, Opera, and Mosaic (people were still using Mosaic) in 2001 Q4. By 2002 Q1, Firefox jumps in and is already above everyone but IE and Netscape, and by 2003 Q1, it’s in second position. It looks like it’s on a (slow) trajectory to overtake IE in about ten years, but then Chrome pops in and starts sucking up IE and Firefox users. Was it just marketing or something more going on here? There’s a fantastic business study in there somewhere, which I’m sure somebody must have done. As a user, I can’t really say I’ve found that much a difference between browsers. I enjoyed Opera for a spell because it had “gestures” the other ones didn’t have, but I stopped using it – you know, I don’t even know why I stopped using it. I guess I just got used to using other browsers. I currently use Chrome, and I’m not even sure why I use it over my native Safari browser. I think there were some plug-ins I liked and then I just stuck with Chrome. ---
**Author:** ![echoreply](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/echoreply/32/3641_2.png) [@echoreply](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/echoreply)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2020, 7:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-browser-wars-of-the-1990s/846709/35 "2020-01-22T19:16:03Z")
> [@iamthewalrus\_3](#): > > Sure, but we have more than just Microsoft to look at. Google tried to use their search dominance to beat Facebook in social networking. Didn’t work. Weirdly enough, lots of companies have tried to unseat Office with free alternatives, but Office continues to be huge! Which is at least some evidence that Office is actually pretty good software (I don’t haI think that you draw the line wherever the software seller wants to draw it. Because there’s no solid _technical_ place to draw the line. Again, there are OSes that ship without window managers. Clearly a GUI isn’t a core part of the OS. But it would be just as absurd to force Microsoft to ship a text-only OS and offer a variety of window managers for people to choose from as it is to force them not to ship a browser. > > And if Microsoft wants to ship a free first person shooter, industrial database, or streaming subscription for free in the next version of Windows, that’s bad for Epic, Oracle, or Netflix (this time I actually mean Netflix), but _good_ for us. The point is that the rules are different for monopolies. Something that might be perfectly fine for one company to do is not fine for another company with a monopoly to do. The important questions are: Did Microsoft have a monopoly? Where they using (or attempting to use) that monopoly to stifle competition in other areas? ---
**Author:** ![amarinth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/3be4f8/32.png) [@amarinth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/amarinth)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2020, 7:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-browser-wars-of-the-1990s/846709/36 "2020-01-22T19:51:13Z")
> [@pulykamell](#): > > What was it about Firefox that so quickly propelled it up to the second most-used browser a year after its introduction? Before it enters the fray, we have IE, Netscape Navigator, Opera, and Mosaic (people were still using Mosaic) in 2001 Q4. By 2002 Q1, Firefox jumps in and is already above everyone but IE and Netscape, and by 2003 Q1, it’s in second position. It looks like it’s on a (slow) trajectory to overtake IE in about ten years, but then Chrome pops in and starts sucking up IE and Firefox users. As I remember it isn’t that firefox was so great (and 2nd place at that time wasn’t a huge share, it’s 2%, because Microsoft was at 95%) it’s that Netscape died. ([Confirmation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape) - Time Warner AOL bought it out in 1999 and killed it in 2003.) It is also interesting to look at that video and remember what was happening, e.g., Firefox starts to take off at around the time that smartphones become more standard - that feels like there might be a correlation. ---
**Author:** ![iamthewalrus\_3](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/258eb7/32.png) [@iamthewalrus\_3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iamthewalrus_3)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2020, 8:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-browser-wars-of-the-1990s/846709/37 "2020-01-22T20:08:44Z")
> [@echoreply](#): > > The point is that the rules are different for monopolies. Something that might be perfectly fine for one company to do is not fine for another company with a monopoly to do. The important questions are: Did Microsoft have a monopoly? Where they using (or attempting to use) that monopoly to stifle competition in other areas? Totally. And, reiterating my point about time providing a new vantage point, I thought that the answers to those questions were “yes” and “yes” in the 1990s. I’m definitely not saying that this was obviously wrong at the time. But now I think the answer to the first was “no”, because “a monopoly in desktop computers” turned out to be mostly irrelevant, since it was in fact possible to make money shipping computing devices that didn’t run Windows, it just wasn’t possible to do so in the specific form factor that Microsoft focused on. And the answer to the second one, even if you still think the first is a “yes”, is also mostly a “no”, because we now know that no one was ever going to make any money selling a web browser for very long so it mostly didn’t matter. **amarinth** , my recollection is that Firefox actually _was_ that good in comparison, mostly because IE 5 and 6 were truly awful. Like, just incredibly bad. I was mostly an Opera user at the time, which in my opinion really was the technically best browser for a while in the early 2000s, but was eventually eclipsed by Chrome. I think the correlation between Firefox and smartphones is just “the internet became more important”. ---
**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2020, 8:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-browser-wars-of-the-1990s/846709/38 "2020-01-22T20:12:26Z")
> [@iamthewalrus\_3](#): > > Right, I understand that. Do you think that in a parallel universe where Microsoft didn’t give IE away for free, we’d still be paying for browsers? Or would basically the same thing have happened, and lots of other companies and open source groups would be giving them away? I think it’d be the latter. I think maybe Netscape would have lasted a _little_ longer, but something as basic and necessary to the modern use of a computer as a browser would not exist as paid software for very long. We’re still paying for the OS itself, which is even more necessary. Granted, maybe every computer would be bundled with the browser, same as the OS. Or maybe the browser would have become the OS as its features grew. But I do think the landscape changes dramatically if Microsoft didn’t bundle IE. Netscape has no reason to turn to open source and make Mozilla. KDE has less reason to make a browser for its OS, and no impetus from open source Mozilla. Without KDE, Apple doesn’t use open source to make Webkit, though I can’t see them not integrating a browser like they chose to integrate other programs, due to the initial low amount of third party support. From there maybe we get Macs becoming dominant and becoming the impetus for a Mozilla-like project which takes off. Or Microsoft is forced to give IE away for the OS. But it so completely changes everything that I’m not sure open source enters the picture. Open source was a convenience for Apple. What is your proposed timeline for all this with free Internet Explorer, or the bundling with the OS that makes it feel like an essential part? ---
**Author:** ![ftg](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ftg/32/2801_2.png) [@ftg](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ftg)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2020, 8:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-browser-wars-of-the-1990s/846709/39 "2020-01-22T20:49:13Z")
> [@MrDibble](#): > > Yes. It’s called wget. Oooh, you had wget? Lucky dog. I’ve set up things starting with Lynx to download stuff that wget couldn’t grab due to website nonsense. Once just within the last 2 years. ---
**Author:** ![echoreply](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/echoreply/32/3641_2.png) [@echoreply](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/echoreply)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2020, 9:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-browser-wars-of-the-1990s/846709/40 "2020-01-22T21:09:20Z")
> [@iamthewalrus\_3](#): > > But now I think the answer to the first was “no”, because “a monopoly in desktop computers” turned out to be mostly irrelevant, since it was in fact possible to make money shipping computing devices that didn’t run Windows, it just wasn’t possible to do so in the specific form factor that Microsoft focused on. And the answer to the second one, even if you still think the first is a “yes”, is also mostly a “no”, because we now know that no one was ever going to make any money selling a web browser for very long so it mostly didn’t matter. Not talking about the details of the actual trial, but the impact on technology and the world: It was never about selling browsers, it was about controlling the entire ecosystem of websites. The dream is that to use any website of any complexity you need to have ActiveX, and the only way to get that is by using a Microsoft browser running on a Microsoft OS. They probably would still have come up with Internet Explorer for the Mac, as they did have Office for the Mac, because nobody at the time took Apple too seriously. The best way to run a Microsoft enhanced website is on IIS, which also only runs on Microsoft OSes, and requires a Microsoft OS on the desktop to manage the servers, and to develop the web pages. The battle isn’t about just the browser. Would the iPhone have been successful if it couldn’t use most websites? Maybe, but it was a big deal that iPhones had trouble with Flash and Java applets. At the time of the iPhone’s initial release those were still pretty important, but only on some websites, not most sites. I’m not saying all of that is what would have happened if the trial hadn’t occurred, but that is what the fight was about, not about whether companies needed to pay $50/seat for Netscape or get IE as part of Windows. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-browser-wars-of-the-1990s/846709.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-browser-wars-of-the-1990s/846709.md?page=3)