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Andreessen on the Browser Wars

Posted by michael on from the if-you-can't-beat-em dept.

Pauly writes "In this interview, Marc Andreessen dismisses the likelihood of a renewed browser war based on the release of Mozilla 1.0. He cites Microsoft's current monopolistic market share, and dares anyone to try and fight it."

3 of 543 comments (clear)

  1. Netscape as AOL backup plan... by javacowboy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This is an interesting except:

    Andreessen: Yeah, I think so. When they originally did the acquisition, the big motivation around it was to be able to have a bargaining chip ... to get better terms. They could say, 'We own Netscape, and we're willing to use Internet Explorer, but if you don't give us distribution through the Windows desktop we're going to use Netscape and we're going to double its market share overnight and cause you guys lots of problems.' There's no internal goal at AOL, or at l! east when I was there, to go get browser market share.

    This would have never occurred to me, but it makes so much sense...

    AOL hasn't been promoting Netscape the way they could have been, and they certainly seemed to have gone out of their way NOT to switch.

    Now I know why...

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  2. He has a point... by InspectorZero · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Andreessen has a point - the browser is, in probably 95% of cases, practically invisible to the user these days. The average user doesn't care enough to start another browser war. And really, what good would a browser war do at this point? It will be impossible to de-throne MS until someone comes up with a compelling new service or feature that MS doesn't and/or can't immediately offer. I don't know if that's even possible.

    But the end of his article makes the most compelling argument to abandon Internet Explorer for Mozilla - form factor! I'm proud to proclaim that I, for one, love the Mozilla form factor. It beats IE hands down - skins, tabbed browsing... and the fact that it's open source doesn't hurt my opinion of it either. It's just more friendly - and that's where you really win users. It's not how you corner a market (MS never could have done it if they were friendly), but it's how you get a cult following. Props to the Mozilla team! And don't listen to the naysayers.

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  3. Re:I DID read the article... by mark_lybarger · · Score: 5, Interesting

    you describe a common issue for people with ie 5.x and NN 4.7 installed.

    then in enters mozilla .... the most standards compliant browser around. let me tell you web developers would LOVE to code to a standard and not to a browser. i think mozilla (and the next gen NN) will change the way web sites are being coded. sure the old ones will have to be updated, but that happens every 3-6 months anyway. how many sites still have "best viewed with NN 4.7 or IE 4.x" on them? those browsers have been obsolete since 2k at least. (just to point out, there are many W3C standards that IE doesn't implement correctly either, but hey, we've coded around them since that has been the defacto standard for the last 2+yrs).

    add on top of that features and time to market. mozilla is a rapidly developing browser. it took a while to get where it is today, but lots of that has been foundation. now it's being rapidly refined and innovated. IE just can't/won't do that. it's part of the OS after all ;). the NN releases might be more less frequent, but i tell ya, this browser is catching on, and quickly. why? the features. users like to stop the annoying pop up windows. users like tabbed browsing. users will switch in a heartbeat for a standards compliant browser that has better features. that time to market "feature" is how users will continue to receive more and more features before the competition has beta's out.