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Andreessen on the Browser Wars
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."
No, you seem to forget:
Steve Balmer "Give it up for ME!!!!!!"
RonB
It is human nature to take shortcuts in thinking.
This is an interesting except:
... 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.
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
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...
This space left intentionally blank.
I agree Mozilla is the /.er's dream - the public hardly knows about it. Heck, I would venture to say that there is a HUGE group that doesn't even know about Netscape anymore. Look at Opera, which is a very sound browser in it's own right - it's user base is extremely limited, and it has been out for a good number of years.
Trust me, I want to see someone make a run at M$ crap, BUT I don't see it happening. Not without an act of God.
RonB
It is human nature to take shortcuts in thinking.
Let's see, Opera is open source and Andreessen joined Netscape early. The first is totally false, the second is of secondary importance. Andreessen co-wrote Mosaic. Guess IDG reporters don't remember that. What other stupid errors can you spot?
Who really cares? We've got a great browser named Mozilla now, with great features, great standards support and a great feature. As long as people care about Mozilla it will continue.
"Winning" now isn't about who has the most market share. It's about making enough of a dent in it that "web developers" recognize they need to support web standards and not MS IE standards. The web is for everyone, not IE users on Windows. (And I can say that because IE on Windows and Mac have tons of differences often overlooked by IE Web developers.)
Go Go Mozilla!
With AOL 8.0 using a Gecko derivative you never know. Of course it helps IE a lot that it comes with M$'s OS. If only Apple saw the light and made Mozilla their default browser. I thought they were into Open Source?
Seems like a discussion between two people who are a bit out of it...
Andreesen is wrong about a few things. MS can be combated successfully. The trick is to not play their game of proprietary software on a platform they control. No one can succeed in that territory. The trick is not to succumb to their tactics, and to stay agile and ahead of them
Well, MS does not really have a way of combating Mozilla. How are they going to undermine a free product. As long as we keep fighting the battles we can beat the Beast. It's going to take patience and a few good victories to gain momentum.
It's already happening, Wal-Mart's loading Linux on their dirt-cheap PCs for the masses, Apple's making thier systems ever more Linux frindly, IBM has given Linux their papal blessing. Peru and a few other enlightened Nation-states are considering Linux. ILM and the CG market is shifting to Linux.
Mozilla already boast features that IE does not have: Tab browsing, ad disabling, cleaner javascript, multiple platform support. Let's build on this take the browser even further. By constantly improving the user experience Mozilla can win back users.
Ultimately, Linux and Mozilla will win the mindshare battle one step at a time. Let's continue to build kick ass, peer reviewed software one line at a time, and we will succeed in time. Give this time, in 3-5 years time, more victories will come.
Remember it is darkest before sun rise.
Mozilla?
Konqueror?
Dillo?
Opera?
I can't decide.
IE ? what's that? never heard of it.
Romana: "How did you know?" Doctor Who: "Ah, well, knowing is easy. Everyone does THAT ad nauseum. I just sort of hope"
Netscape didn't lose because Microsoft had a 'monoloplistic share of the market.' It lost because IE was:
1) A better browser than Netscape
2) Free as in beer
Amazing how some 'free software' advocates tend to side with the opposite on this argument. Netscape used to cost $50 a pop back in the day.
IE got its 'monopolistic market share' before Windows 98 integration. It simply won it over by being the best. I even remember running IE 3 on lil' old slowpoke Mac LC's back in the day... cause, seriously, who the fudge wanted to pay the Netscape license fee?
Netscape 4.x did them over. I'd rather stick pins though my eyes while simultaneously having my testicles placed into a Salad Shooter than use that browser. It would crash faster than I could type this sentence.
Mark is just a whiny little pansy, cause he lost the browser war. That cock Larry Ellison would be saying the same if tomorrow Microsoft decided to say "Well, hell, we're deciding to give SQL Server away for free now, just pay for support."
"But nooooo! It's not fair!"
-- Larry Ellison, 2003
Just to show how much of an idiot he is, this comes from the Oracle 9i site:
"Unbreakable
Can't break it. Oracle9i Database won't go down if your server fails and won't go down if your site fails."
Right. So the power supply on the server dies, and Milton from Office Space burns down the building, but Oracle keeps on running! Go Larry! Please, show me the car that keeps running when the f**king powertrain falls out of the hood. Puh-leeze.
Aw, fuck it. Let's go bowling. - The Big Lebowski
Since this is Slashdot, I suspect I'm going to get modded down right quick, but...
Two seperate questions here, I think. For windows desktop users, IE is great (yeah, I know, security, but your average desktop user could care less). Microsoft isn't going to lose their marketshare without a seriously inferior product, and at the moment, it a hell of a lot better than Netscape's offering. I doubt Microsoft is worried about Opera either, and Opera makes a damn fine browser. But as much as some hate to admit it, the browser wars don't really matter. It's a sideshow, a commodity. Why should we really care? (And no, standard compliance isn't a good reason. We have that already.)
On the other hand, once you move to servers and/or *nix platforms, I don't see why anyone cares about Netscape or IE. You've got Opera, Lynx, Mozilla, and a half dozen others.
In fact, why are we using the release of Mozilla to talk about Netscape? To be absolutely blunt, Netscape deserves to die. Face it, their products have always been too little, too late - terminally behind the technology curve, and with horrible UI bugs (which might be better than security holes, but try telling Joe Sixpack that!).
Is there any coincidence between AOL's subscriber base and the fact that they have mailed out zillions of CD's to sign up for their 'service'?
IE is the default browser for 'commoners', because it's there when they turn on Windows. AOL got their software in everybody's hands via snail mail.
Maybe find some method of getting Mozilla to every person's mailbox, and you might have a shot.
Not that I'd bet my money on it, though.
Though Marc did make the hypothetical scenerio of AOL bundling Mozilla with AOL CD's (hence, the existing means of getting Mozilla to everybody), however states that AOL has no internal motive for getting browser market share.
Not that I think they should.... personally, the higher the percentage of the world using a single browser version, the further along advanced web-based development could progress, because gone is the issue of making everything compatible with the lowest common denomanator.
www.Beyond7.com Insane modern art water sculpture.
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.
------------------------------------
Spiral out... keep going.
Andreessen doesn't seem to see the big picture. The browser wars on Windows may be over, but he fails to realize that on Linux, they are just beginning. With more and more people "seeing the light," Netscape, Mozilla, and Konqueror will become the dominant web browsers, as MSIE is left in the dust. Perhaps if Microsoft releases an IE for Linux they can retain some market share; otherwise, we can start to say so long to an IE-centric web and hello to uniform standards.
It's also always darkest before it goes pitch black.
:)
[o]_O
I've tried occasional milestone builds over the years, and not liked them. I can't deal with using Netscape, it bugs me for some odd reason.
But 1.0 has honestly taken over as a browser for me. I very rarely use any other browsers anymore, and it has taken over, at least on my desktop, as my main browser.
This isn't for some pseudo-religious reason, this isn't zealotry, I just really really like it.
It's fast, which matters on the older machines I have in the house, and the "open in new tab" thing...
It's such a simple thing, tabbing browser windows instead of opening them in new windows...
...but it makes all the difference for me. I can't use a browser without it anymore, and it hooked me within 5 minutes of firing it up.
Great feature. If only it would detect installed plugins and use them automatically instead of forcing me to either set up all of my helper applications manually or re-install all of the plugins, it would be the perfect newbie experience.
I didn't expect to like it. But I do.
Frankly, it sounds like Andreesson's not really interested in browsers anymore. All that he seems to care about in that arena is marketshare. I think that he gave up the browser as dead and made a concious decision to move on with his life.
I can't really blame the guy. He put a lot of time and energy into creating Netscape, only to see his company get maliciously crushed by Microsoft. That's an emotionally grueling experience, and I'm not surprised that he's not as enthusiastic about browsers as he used to be. I'd much rather hear his take on the future of web services and what Loudcloud's doing these days.
This
That's ludicrous. Any piece of software that implements a standard or common algorithm can be "replicated by anyone". Is it worht billions in stock? No. But it's not worthless either.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
What are the chances people are going to be using IE 30 years from now versus something that originated from the Mozilla codebase?
As the Mozilla codebase improves in the light of public scrutiny and the IE codebase becomes older and more obscure, things will start to change. It will become cheaper and cheaper to produce a new browser implementation for a specific application based on Mozilla. At the same time, the bills for the continued development of IE will start to pile up for MS. IE will get less attention from coders. Mozilla will get more. In the long run, costs will dictate the outcome and IE will lose.
That's my prediction. Just look what happened to Linux, and look how long it took. Have patience.
Uh..Duh? How about undermining it by making their browser also free and also bundling it with the OS 95% of the world is using? How does MOZILLA combat THAT? Note: A download is NOT FREE. It costs time, and in many places of the world bandwidth is not flat-rate, so its not even "free" in that sense.
I won't even bother getting into the discussion of which is a better product from a Windows end-user perspective, since its an opinion. Suffice it to say, Mozilla is not demonstrably a better browser for everyone, even if it might render HTML more correctly according to the standard.
Lastly you seem to forget that Netscape was one the guy with 90%+ of the browser market, and it was, for all intents, free. Yes, they charged business customers but that's fairly insignificant as the vast majority of people (maybe 90% of the original 90%) were using it for free. So obviously Microsoft found away to combat that (see not-so-secret-strategy above).
if mighty Marc couldn't do it, no one can.
-pyrrho
you describe a common issue for people with ie 5.x and NN 4.7 installed.
.... 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).
;). 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.
then in enters mozilla
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
Aside from the fact that Microsoft has 93% of the browser marketshare, many websites are designed to be viewed with Internet Explorer. As long as the majority of the operating system marketshare is owned by Microsoft, you can guarantee that the majority of the browser marketshare will be, too.
Too many people use IE, and since alot of people use IE, alot of websites are designed for it. When a user can't view a webpage correctly in Netscape/Mozilla, what do they do? Run IE! (Unless there's no better alternative, or the hardcore Slashdotter absoultely refuses to put his/her hands anywhere NEAR a MS product.
Off the topic of this post, those random exclamation (!) marks in that article were kind of annoying...
void women (int money, time_t time);
Being Free Software has made Mozilla hundreds of times more popular than it should be. Heck, if Mozilla wasn't Free Software probably no one would be using it. For years it was hardly useable, and yet people (like me) still fired it up.
Now it is actually good, but Microsoft has all of the marketshare. The few people that are using it are almost without doubt using it because it is Free Software. Because it is Free Software, and because it is very cool, it is even being used in new projects which will undoubtedly drive its acceptance.
My guess is that in the long run it will even continue to gain converts, but this is only because it is Free. I don't personally think it would grow its userbase even if they gave it away but kept the source code. The only reason that people are interested in it is that they know that they can build on it, but that is quite likely to be enough to keep it alive and growing.
Andreesen is wrong about a few things. MS can be combated successfully. The trick is to not play their game of proprietary software on a platform they control. No one can succeed in that territory. The trick is not to succumb to their tactics, and to stay agile and ahead of them.
This has been tried, and it failed. You're assuming that the average consumer/user out there actually CARES about technological superiority. They don't. IE is "good enough", and it already comes installed on everything known to man, including damned internet-ready refrigerators. For your AVERAGE consumer something has to be exponentially better before they will eschew it in favor of the bundled item. Netscape fought against this and look what happened to them. I'm not going to debate the legality of what MS did to Netscape because that's not the topic here, but suffice to say that I don't think there's ANYTHING Mozilla could possibly bring to the table that would reverse the current trend, unless they found a way to have it read minds and present holographic interactive representations of supermodels for your pleasure.
"Don't fight with MS on their turf/by their rules" has been tried before, and it just does not work. MS either has their turf too well covered or they change the rules (FUD, vaporware, strongarm) to destroy the competition. With but few exceptions no one has stood up to MS and won (for long). Linux is a relative exception, but only (IMHO) because there is no corporate entity behind Linux that MS can attack. Unfortunately, that very lack is what's keeping Linux from making inroads beyond the server room, at least in the minds of the executives, VP's, and Director's who sign the big checks for software purchases.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Mozilla 1.0 got installed on my machine for one reason: they've got the best mail client this side of pine. I've always enjoyed NSmail, and Mozilla has continued the fine tradition, even improving it with the multiple POP accounts (although I've switched to IMAP exclusively).
:/
Although, to tell you the truth, I found myself browsing with Mozilla for quite a while yesterday without realizing I wasn't in IE. It's a remarkable effort from the Mozilla.org team. Now if only Ctrl-N would pop open a cloned window, instead of a new one that loads he homepage.
I would like to direct your attention to an answer Marc gave to a question about the MS Antitrust proceedings. For those who didn't RTFA, Loudcloud is Marc's new business...
Andreessen: Generally, Microsoft is a partner of Loudcloud, and we work really well with them at Loudcloud because we support their technology and we have a bunch of customers running on Windows. So we don't take formal positions on remedies or lawsuits.
(Bold emphasis mine)
Can you say S-E-L-L-O-U-T?
nuclear presidential echelon assassination encryption virulent strain
Whizzmo
Word. Although IE is my main browser, I do all my testing in Moz cause I know if it looks perfect in Moz it will look perfect in IE. IE is a little lenient, which is a catch-22... it encourages lazy coding. It may look like shit in other browsers.
Aw, fuck it. Let's go bowling. - The Big Lebowski
I am not sure if I agree with all of his comments about the browser war being dead. Specifically, since IE4 was released, the quality of the browser has been decreasing fast. IE5.5 was a good release, thanks to the throwing out the WIN32 code base and backporting the Mac version of IE. IE 5.0 was rubbish, and I use Mozilla on my Win 2000 box instead of IE6 because it is more stable.
Microsoft focused on the target with IE4, hit a grand slam out of the park, and hasn't really been focusing on the game since. If the browser war is to return, I believe it will be due to quality problems in IE.
BTW - I wish Microsoft would fix the png bugs which have existed for a couple versions. Makes image creation a major pain in the butt.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
web developers would LOVE to code to a standard and not to a browser
The problem with this comment is that a sufficiently entrenched browser BECOMES a standard, RFC's and "the community's opinion" notwithstanding. Remember when IE was the pitiful underling and Netscape ruled all? Netscape advanced the neat idea of "frames" -- nonstandard, but it BECAME a standard overnight as people rushed to take advantage of it. Same thing with IE: after IE won the browser wars you saw everyone rushing to make damn sure their sites were "IE compliant". Nobody gave much thought to whether it was standards compliant. Why? Folks don't view web pages with a "standard", they view it with a browser. If one browser owns 95% of the market, it IS a standard, like it or not.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
How so? Opera's market share of the total browser market is pitifully tiny compared to the IE juggernaut. It may be "huge" in the sense of it being a very popular alternative to IE, but since IE has about 95% of the market, even if Opera were THE ONLY alternative, they'd only have 5% of the market. That's TINY, practically INSIGNIFICANT in the grand scheme of things.
Please note I'm no IE flag waiver, nor am I an Opera defender/accuser, I'm just making an observation here.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The interviewer definitely didn't know what he was talking about...
But if you give Andreesen the benefit of the doubt, you can read Andreesen's response as a rhetorical question. That is, I think he was ignoring the (mistaken) open source aspect of the question, and simply dismissing the interviewer's question as irrelevant because no browser has a share of the market that can touch Microsoft's share. He seemed pretty focused on that point.
Or, yes, maybe he really isn't paying attention to the browser alternatives out there and is no longer in a position to say anything authoritative. That's certainly a valid reading of his remarks. I don't know. I was rather disappointed in the interview's brevity and lack of depth.
For your AVERAGE consumer something has to be exponentially better before they will eschew it in favor of the bundled item.
Killing popups *is* exponentially better than IE.
Having actually talked to quite a few "average users" who don't care about technological superiority, when I say "Mozilla kills popups dead" their eyes bug out and they immediately want it.
Being as he hasn't worked at netscape for about 3 years, and since then has started a startup with little to nothing going for it other than "OOH!! IT'S MARCA FROM NETSCAPE!!!" I personally think it's complete bunk.
I bet a lot of the people who didn't quit, and still work at netscape feel the same way. I really don't have much of a view on the subject, as I joined the company almost 1 year to the day after they got bought by AOL.
On top of that, I seem to have become the unofficial netscape-flag holding troll on here.
Christ, I dunno, I take a lot of pride in my work at the company, and when he goes and says shit like this, it honestly feels like a kick in the balls to me, and to everyone who is still working on the browser. Fuck, I work with 5 people on my team (out of 9) who were around back before AOL bought the company. he just pretty much slapped them in the face.
Anyhow, fuck it, I'm outta here.
exactly, and moz is going to change that 95%. developers (and their managers) would rather code to an RFC than to some piece of software (browser). just like java developers would rather code to the java platform and not to some specific java compiler or OS. did java developers in the past develop OS specific code? of course, but the tout of the language and the platform is it's portability. developers can code to a standard, and the jvm vendors must implement that standard. the best implementors will get the most business. same goes for web browsers.
on your frames example, it just shows how using a non-standard technology can bite you in the arse. the RFC's and standards in general are all about generating public debates on the usefullness of technologies and to allow other ideas to surface in the process. propriatary technologies are just that, some isolated idea from a cube farm that manages to work it's way into the next product. not really the best way to innovate.
Huh? What do you mean? Other people have implemented X on MacOS X and ported Linux apps to MacOS X. But what has Apple itself done with respect to Linux? I use both Linux and MacOS X, and I haven't seen Apple do anything at all to make their system more "Linux friendly." (Considering that Apple's desktop market share is about 5%, whereas Linux's is about 0.5%, it's hard to see why Apple would care about Linux either way.)
Mozilla already boast features that IE does not have: Tab browsing, ad disabling, cleaner javascript, multiple platform support. Let's build on this take the browser even further. By constantly improving the user experience Mozilla can win back users.
Your average IE use doesn't know these features exist. If it became an issue, MS could easily incorporate them into IE.
Wal-Mart's loading Linux on their dirt-cheap PCs for the masses
Uh, they're loading up Lindows for the masses. And I suspect most of the masses are either going to return the machine when they find out it doesn't run their favorite Windows apps, or else reformat the hard disk and install Windows on it.
Find free books.
From the interview:
IDG: How about just the idea of having an open source browser, the Opera Web browser for instance.!
Doh!
Debian: GNU/Linux done the Linux way
"My attitude is, everybody should try competing with Microsoft once in their life. Once."
The cool thing is that Microsoft has tried competing with Sony and Nintendo, and they are losing like crazy to Sony. Nintendo will ultimately beat Microsoft as well, giving them a little piece of long-overdue humble pie to digest for a while...
http://www.walkingtaco.com
(open source) is clearly not compelling yet or (Opera)
Sigh; Opera's not open source. Of all the reasons to discount open source right now, the success or failure of Opera doesn't seem to be one of them.
I thought the term "open source" was supposed to help us eliminate the confusion between software-gratis and software-with-freedoms-included.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
So, Andreessen is saying: we are partners of M$, we have to kiss M$'s ass. Can we trust his opinion on browser wars ?.
Don't forget Apple's recent campaign:
Switch!
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
It always surprises me that people treat Marc Andreessen as a "visionary". As I see it, he's a programmer of some talent who happened to be in the right place at the right time to be tapped by Jim Clark (the REAL visionary) to take his browser (which he did not invent, but merely polished the creation of Tim Berners-Lee) and try and make a new industry with it. Without Jim Clark (not just his money, but his business sense and entrepreneurial spirit), nobody would know Marc Andreessen today. So far as I can see, he's no more deserving of that kind of respect than any of a number of folks at Netscape. The ARE kudos that the folks at Netscape deserve, as the people at Netscape did an enormous amount to develop many of the technologies that have made the WWW what it is today -- but I don't see that Mr Andreessen deserves any more credit than anyone else.
Unfortunately,I have no knowledge of Netscape that anyone else couldn't get through the media, so these are merely the opinions of someone willing to question the popular perceptions.
I'm not trying to disparage the man, but IMHO, he's shown no particular managerial skills or any aspects of a true visionary. I expect Loudcloud to quietly burn through its VC financing, and slip beneath the waves, just another dot-com bomb.
The fact that he's so willing to accept that just because Microsoft owns the market today, they will always and forever do so, should discredit him as a man of imagination.
Just for a second, image the consequences of a hypothetical event like Homeland Security deciding to hold individual (and corporate) computer users responsible for the viruses their systems propagate, in an attempt to wake people up to responsible operation of their computers. In such a scenario, it wouldn't take more than a few highly-publicized cases of clueless PC users whose systems launch DOS attacks being prosecuted to change the dynamics of the marketplace significantly.
Change Happens -- All the Time.
No visionary expects the future to be anything like the present.
it's the corporate market that shapes the consumer markets. people will use the same products at home that they're use to at work. once some large corporations make moz/nn once again the browser of choice in their environment, ie will start to loose it's market share.
m$ originally combatted NN with bundling the browser. win 95 came with ie 3.0. at the time, people were willing to install NN because it was better. but when win started being included with IE 4.0 that changed. people saw that it was a fairly good browser, and gave up NN like last week's girlfriend. no phone call, nothing. when ie 5.x was getting started, and NN released their pathetic 6.0 browser it was just to keep a minute amount of people happy (it probably didn't really do that) and to kinda let hte public know they were still alive. again moz will change that. it's a better browser and once users (and corporate environments) see it's features and functionality, i see them flocking. IE's time is limited. when moz is able to replace win's file explorer all around, it will gain more share. it's still too easy to be browsing local files in M$ windows and just decide you want to bring up a web page, and type it in the address bar there. tabbed browsing and no pop-ups are an excellent start, now it's on to level 2...
Large and bloated... It takes forever to load compared to IE
Pages take longer to load
Has annoying little UI bugs that keep popping up (ex. Typing in a new URL on the address bar occasionally causes the current page to reload, instead of going to the new page; focus doesn't always move to a field when you click on it, etc...)
Doesn't consistantly display pages correctly-I have pages that will display on my copy of Mozilla that my coworker can't get to display on his.
The average user doesn't have the slightest dea what open source means, or care about it at all unless they have been brainwashed into being as anti-Microsoft as a lot of the people on here are.
Mozilla definately has promise, and I love some of the developer tools that come with it, but I don't think the average user will put up with the many little annoyances I've found in it. It still has a LOT of work before I think it will be any sort of a threat to IE.
Well, I didn't bother reading the article (because hey, this is slashdot), but I must say that I've actually had really good success convincing my intermediately-computer-skilled friends to use Mozilla. They don't have any sort of browser loyalty. I just showed them tabbed browsing with middle click, ad blocking, the sidebar, and they decided that it was better than IE.
That, and, I hear AOL is switching to NS6?
Anyway, why does it matter? Mozilla has enough users and developers now to support it as an open source project, so winning or losing the browser "war" doesn't mean much to those of us who just want a good browser to use..
We need to make sure people have the link to Mozilla as their signature. It should be part of their e-mail too.
photosMy Photostream
This has been tried, and it failed. You're assuming that the average consumer/user out there actually CARES about technological superiority. They don't. IE is "good enough", and it already comes installed on everything known to man, including damned internet-ready refrigerators. For your AVERAGE consumer something has to be exponentially better before they will eschew it in favor of the bundled item. Netscape fought against this and look what happened to them. I'm not going to debate the legality of what MS did to Netscape because that's not the topic here, but suffice to say that I don't think there's ANYTHING Mozilla could possibly bring to the table that would reverse the current trend, unless they found a way to have it read minds and present holographic interactive representations of supermodels for your pleasure.
While I see where you are coming from, I have to disagree. Look at Quicken, for instance. Microsoft fought that piece of software with MS Money for quite a long time, tooth & nail on several occasions. And on certain fronts, MS Money was as good as Quicken. However, Quicken still maintains almost 80% of the home finance market. Despite MS's attempts at bundling MS Money with MS Works, despite their discounts on it with purchases of MS office. Quicken does one thing, and it does it extremely well, and consumers know that. They really do care if it Quicken or not.
By that same token, I think consumers will really care about their browsers. I honestly think that IE won a lot of the market share because NS4 and especially NS6 were slow & buggy. (Of course, having the browser built inot the OS helps too). MS did have the better product, but they don't anymore. If AOL goes to a Netscape browser, and the consumers find the new features, the tabbed browsing, etc., I think there is a good chance of them not wanting to go back to IE. I was just speaking to a friend of mine who uses AOL earlier tonight, and she, albeit a textbook case of an AOL user, was asking me about other browsers because she had heard about some recent security holes in IE (e.g. Gopher hole).
There is a movement growing out there, and believe it not, AOL could be the best chance we geeks have to get an Open-Source browser back into the market.
I fight against Microsoft on a daily basis by never buying or using any of their products
There's billions of people in the world that never use Microsoft product. Fighting means doing something, not just ignoring the problem.
Wal-Mart's loading Linux on their dirt-cheap PCs for the masses
Replacing their no-OS computers...
Apple's making thier systems ever more Linux frindly
So you can install Linux on an Apple system. So what? I can do that on any Wintel system...
IBM has given Linux their papal blessing
In the server market, which they previously used Unix in.
Peru and a few other enlightened Nation-states are considering Linux
Who's combined tech budget probably equals the budget for the Clippy development team at Microsoft, and who most likely weren't using Windows widely (older systems, most likely)...
ILM and the CG market is shifting to Linux
From mainly Unix and some Mac systems...
In short - none of the "victories" you've mentioned are really victories at all - they've had zero effect on Windows' market share. "Yay, Linux is beating Microsoft because some Unix users switched to Linux" doesn't make logical sense.
After Version 4.7, Netscape turned to solid crap. Yeah, it began to look better but it was slower than molassus and buggier than Aliens. Parent is right in that respect. All IE did was endure. Netscape killed itself and the other browsers were just crawling from under the rocks, still evolving into something actually worth competing with. IE won by defalt then fortified it's position by integrating it into Windows, which, contrary to popular belief is not monopolistic practice. It's their OS, their program. MS has the right to do whatever the hell they want to it; Even make it hostile to other applications. Their external business practices on the other hand...
You need a FREE iPod Nano
What has IE "introduced"? Not much of worth, that's for sure, but they DID introduce the concept of integrating the browser with the damned operating system. For better or worse it resulted in the practical death of Netscape.
Get it through your head that product A does NOT have to be demonstrably better than product B, so long as product A is provided in a more convenient manner, or product B is more of a pain to obtain. While this may chafe our sense of technological "rightness", it is reality.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Well I did my part of showing off Mozilla by starting with my Dad...
So recently, that lovely klez virus ran right through my dad's computer without him even knowing it. Thanks for his email client of choice, Outlook Express (Without any patches at all) he got a whole bunch of errors when trying to send mail. People with virus scanners were sending automated messages back to my Dad informing him of klez.
As usual my Dad calls me over to fix it. I explain to him just how flawed and insecure Outlook is. How that even with all these patches you can download and install, there will be exploits popping up in no time at all. My Dad didn't like the sound of that so he asked me what his alternatives where.
I layed out the few for him, Eudora, TheBat, and Mozilla. Perfectly timed, this whole klez incident happened a few days after Mozilla 1.0 was released. I eagerly told him about this browser+email client that after 4 years of amazing development, has finally reached 1.0 status. Him not being too fazed by all this asked me what I should pick for him. I went on to explain that Mozilla was pretty much no where near open to exploition as Internet Explorer or Outlook. Right away he said show me.
I installed it for him and showed him his way around. He has a large address book which he was worried would be lost, but Mozilla imported it perfectly. Within 5 minutes he was all up to speed on how to make it work.
So at least he's using the email part of Mozilla, but I'm sure with enough time and effort I can convert him to use the browser instead of IE. He mostly cares about his bookmarks since he has about 1000 of them organized. So I showed him that Mozilla already imports them. His mini-preview of the browser has been positive so far. Now I only need to take the step further to show him that it's also safer to surf the web with Mozilla.
Do your part, tell people how much better Mozilla is at web and email.
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Check out my blackbox styles
As far as I remember, Andreessen was a competent programmer who was able to make a big buck by transfering intelectual property from an open source/freeware inniciative (Mosaic) to a privately owned enterprise more or less exactly at the right moment. All "vision" he might have had was poured upon (into?) his head by "whatwashisname", Netscape founder and first CEO.
Personally I'm finding Andreessen to be very pessimistic and trollish in vision. This is the man that once had a very ambitious vision, but it looks like the failure of his company against the Goliath of all companies has quelled his visionary persona just a tad.
"The bad news is the browser is kind of done" he says, well I hardly think so. Personally I feel the way the Internet works currently is irksome and could use a ton of tweaking. Indeed, there is only so much one can do to comply with standards, but it's taking those standards and actually doing something with it. Tabbed browsing, advanced print control, faster load times, better download support, built in anti-pop up, meta refresh notification and so much more! We must being taking the browsers beyond displaying a web page and actually providing useful information or helping the user browse more efficiently.
Ford didn't say "alright guys, you know, this car is certainly going forward, backward, left and right well enough, I don't think there's too much more we can really do...", no, he and his predecessors kept thinking up new ideas, making their cars safer, easier to handle, more fuel efficient, quieter, sleeker and so much more. He went beyond the basics of forward, backward, left and right and built a company on innovation. If Andreessen doesn't realize this then I don't think he's someone that should be heading the project to take on Microsoft.
There are many more advancements a browser could be made to do or support, we're only entering the knee of the bend here, we're starting to look up high, this isn't the time to be afraid of heights.
To make a pun demonstrates the highest understanding of a language
But the key point here is that this is Wal*Mart we are talking about, and what this move really means is that Wal*Mart might be doing something to Microsoft that they do to every other supplier in their supply chain: squeezing every dollar out of them they can. Seriously, Wal*Mart has (I believe) quarterly meetings with all of their suppliers whose sole real purpose is to find ways to get Wal*Mart the product they want to sell more cheaply. When the product is PCs, however, the discussion pretty quickly hits the brick wall of MS licensing fees, which I don't think can ever be made cheap enough for the Behemoth from Bentonville.
It is pretty clear (to me, anyway) that Wal*Mart is exactly the kind of company that could really do serious damage to Microsoft if their market share in PCs through Wal*Mart and Sam's Club stores turns it up a notch. At some point, you will see then *insisting* that (say) HP ditch Windows on the systems they sell, and use some cheap combination of Linux, StarOffice, and a browser like Mozilla to squeeze out an extra $50 or $100 on the cost. Grandma will then fire up the PC she got from Sam's, and the browser will work just fine as will the email and the simple word processor thingie. And that should be the moment when MS first knows genuine fear.
Anti-trust violations are *nothing* compared to the pain you can suffer at the hands of Wal*Mart. If Ballmer and company are lucky, they will have by that time retreated to the role of permanent leech on the corporate desktop and cable broadcaster. Not horrible businesses, but world domination will not be in the cards.
Babar
Sorry, thought I clarifed that, guess it's just the voices in my head again. Paid them and gave them credit card info, student number and an email address. That or you're right - they really ARE good.
:). Opera is at least smart enough to make the last window you were in the active one, so a quick and the page won't crash again.
I completely agree with the gestures - 99% perfection. The other 1% is theirs if they can make it easily configurable.
Yeah - crashing isn't great, hasn't happened lately thankfully. Which actually brings up a wonderful feature though: crash recovery. If I had 20 tabs open, with each tab having a 20-site history - Opera detects the crash and I'm *exactly* where I was before the crash. Related to that is the fact that you can save the current window setup and reload automatically - works beautifully.
Downside: the page that crashed you is likely opening too
Quick-Preferences is another great thing - first three options are: Accept pop-ups, refuse and open in the background. From there, privacy options, scripting enabling/disabling, etc all on one menu that came from one key press or one click and some scrolling.
If you're talking about a password management system, I agree, would be welcome. (but took me a long time to trust ANY browser with THAT much info - and even still, I think I'll hold off on giving Opera that much power over me) The Personal Information section is as close as it gets - one right click and an "insert" later and all info is provided.
Opera gets an A in my books, and with Moz doing so well, I hopefully will never have to choose IE again. Except for those apps that want it, sigh.
A, it has tabs. IE doesn't. I love tabs.
B - I can run the same browser across platforms. Consistency is nice.
C - I dislike having to worry about my box 0wn3d by web pages.
Why?
"Note: A download is NOT FREE. It costs time, and in many places of the world bandwidth is not flat-rate, so its not even "free" in that sense."
Take a gander at your EULAs. For IE, you're only allowed to make a backup copy of the download. For Mozilla, it's do as you please. This means in countries or places where it's not flat rate, they can make as many images from one download and spread it everywhere for a low, low cost!
Praise digital, praise free software, and boo towards trolls. Thank you, have a nice day.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
No, after version 3.x. Version 4 was much, much slower on any computer at the time. It felt as slow then as something like M13 feels now if you compare it to "real" browsers. Version 4 would often have to "reread" IMAP spools, reindex things, lose settings, try to support CSS and fail, had a broken proprietary DHTML model, loved to crash, had memory leaks... need I go on?
The big 4.x push in Netscape is something that was mainly a product of the marktetting department, not properly designed code. To say that it went to shit after the worst went by is just insanity. The Netscape 6.x stuff, while not super-duper polished like a complete browser (remember: it branched from around M18), at least functioned better than Netscape 4. It did CSS, CSS2, it didn't leak memory as much, and it certainly never crashed as often as NS4 (8 times in 4 hours is my record).
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
I don't know how reliable the user ratings are at www.download.com are but it is interesting to note that Mozilla 1.0 has a rating of 87% whilst IE 6.0 is at 54%.
While Mozilla may never come out on top it can reduce Internet Explorers browser share, and always competition is a good thing with software because it will encourage Microsoft to make IE more secure.
aus.music.scrapbook
HTML-based browsers are fine for e-brochures and content, but overall lousy for B-to-B and intranet business forms.
What is sorely needed is a remote GUI browser standard similar to HTML, but for good ol' fashioned GUI's (the kind you make with VB, Delphi, or PowerBuilder). HTML+DOM+JS is too clunky and unnaturally suited for biz forms.
Please don't say XWindows. It runs poorly over HTTP, and other xfer protocols/ports confuse firewalls.
There are several draft proposals and protocols for such floating around, most based on XML. It just needs some big-name company or person to push it/them.
Table-ized A.I.
I too was excited when I saw this earlier today... until I read the comment that pointed out the ugly truth:
Those Lindows-based machines are sold on the web only, not in the retail stores. Very few among "the masses" will buy their PC on-line... generally that's the realm of tech-savvy folks who already own a computer and are buying another one.
It'll be a different story when a linux-based PC is sitting right next to a windows-based PC in the retail store, with a $99 difference in price. I hope those days are coming soon. Someone mentioned that Fry's is planning a $300 PC. Fry's doesn't really have a web store, so maybe they'll be the ones to truely break the ice??
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
I have a better solution than trying to tell people about Mozilla.
Teach other people about what is happening in the tech industry and how it affects their lives. Tell them that the choices they make today will affect their future and their children's future.
Tell them all that, and they will find alternatives not only to IE, but to Outlook, Windows, etc... the general population seems to have an inkling of what software company evil is going on (in my experience), but need someone experienced in the industry to make concrete that thinking.
Browser wars this browser wars that. The browser wars were not real, they existed in the minds of a handful of pundits trying to fill up a magazine column or Linux users harkening back to the good old days which they scarcely remember. OEMs went from bundling Netscape to not bundling Netscape at Microsoft's request. This was more of a "Microsoft shot a cruise missle up Netscape's ass" than a browser war. Microsoft improved IE and bundled it with Windows at the same time as Netscape bloated the hell out of "Communicator" and turned it into a piece of shit that took an hour to open. There will not ever be another so-called browser war because even with broadband internet connections (among only 5% of American internet users and even less elsewhere) why would they download a different browser if the one they have works? While you can praise Mozilla's features all you want (and I've tried to do before) most people don't care enough to go through the hassle. Better is entirely subjective.
However Mozilla doesn't face a bleak future by any means. Netscape is 0wned by AOL who is in constant need of a web client for their software. Netscape, through Mozilla can reliably and effectively provide that. AOL has dropped IE and turned to Netscape for their browsing needs. I wouldn't be at all suprised if AOL rewrote their client to use Mozilla's core libraries. The AOL client would run with little modification on set-top boxes, Macs, and PCs. Mozilla technologies I believe are going to end up a very important part of future AOL software. Who needs another "browser war". AOL can easily pull off a browser coup by switching umpteen million AOL users from Microsoft to Netscape in the course of a week. Not to mention the millions of Macs shipping with Netscape as of 10.2 with the other millions of 10.1 users upgrading. Users will switch not because Netscape/Mozilla is better but because they are fucking handed the software. That is why they started using IE anyways.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Oh yeah, that's gonna happen. If most of the masses were at that level of knowledge, ability, and comfortability with computers, Wal-Mart could have just kept on selling "naked" PCs and let the buyer both decide what to install and do the installation.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Mozilla already boast features that IE does not have: Tab browsing, ad disabling, cleaner javascript, multiple platform support. Let's build on this take the browser even further. By constantly improving the user experience Mozilla can win back users.
So true. Microsoft now has catching up to do on these features. The problem is that, while MS can keep devoting manpower to a project, os only keeps devoting manpower as long as it stays interesting. I expect the development of Mozilla to slow down soon, now 1.0 has been released.
That said, I do not expect MS to implement certain features into their browser that make mozilla so pleasant to use: the turning off of popup/under windows and the ad blocking features. I do not believe MS will hamper advertisers.
the pun is mightier than the sword
So it is misleading to say that IE is always "just there" whereas Mozilla always has to be downloaded or borrowed from a friend. Also, I'd hope to see this situation changing in the near future as OEMs are freed from MS' illegal monopoly agreements.
Female Prison Rape in NY
The thing is Mozilla and Linux and OSS is not making Microsoft lose market. It's making them lose MONEY. Because the had everyone by the balls, and they where ready for serious PROFIT harvesting...
And now they can't, and people blame their bugs, hungs and they get bad press. They are still doing pretty well with 40B in cash. But the industry/countries are starting to discover those 40B could have been in their pockets if they have adopted OSS earlier, or promoted competition.
I am all for trying to kill Microsoft revenues at all costs than to see Linux installed in 99% of the computers. Even a low number of Linux boxes can affect MS's price-choosing abilities: they don't want to lose market share.
Sorry, the post is a bit repetitive (it's late here).
unfinished: (adj.)
If you think that there's a correlation between MSIE's quality and its popularity increasing over time, you're deluding yourself. MSIE got popular because MS said "Make everything we do exist in the context of the Internet." Shortly thereafter, a TCP/IP stack was shoehorned into an operating system, some Spyglass code was licensed, Word could save HTML docs, Outlook could send mail, FrontPage was cabbaged together, and PWS/IIS was foisted upon an unsuspecting public.
As the number of people getting computers rose, so did the number of MSIE users. They saw an icon that said "Internet", they clicked, the modem dialed and they were placing orders in Beanie Baby auctions and finding naked pictures of David Hasselhoff in short order. But quality had nothing to do with it. They could have been running batch files which were telnetting to port 80 and piping to more for all their web browsing -- most of them wouldn't have known any better nor cared one way or the other.
MSIE was a truly horrible browser for a long time. In many ways it still is (holy wars aside, I doubt that merely viewing web pages with a browser besides MSIE will get you infected with the trojan du mois). It could have been the zenith or the nadir of browser technology and it still would have been just as popular.
Anyway, long story short: Don't attribute to thoughtful engineering and careful testing that which can be adequately explained by anti-competitive acts of market aggression in search of an abusive monopoly.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
"Don't fight with MS on their turf/by their rules" has been tried before, and it just does not work.
Oh come on. That is just rubbish. Methinks you wouldn't make a great strategist.
Linux is a relative exception, but only (IMHO) because there is no corporate entity behind Linux that MS can attack.
You see? You've said it yourself. Linux is having outstanding success in server space, and part of the reason is because it does not play be MS's rules. It is developed and supported by multiple companies/individuals which makes it a nightmare for MS. Strategically it's fantastic because not only is it successful but there is no effective strategic response for MS to counter the attack.
If your enemy starts using weapons you haven't got which are more effective than yours, then the normal response is to try to develop equivalent or better weapons. With the GLP, it's next to impossible for MS to do that. Now that's what I call good strategy.
2)There are plenty of overvalue software companies.
Methinks your disdain smacks of sour grapes more than substantive criticism.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
He couldn't care less about extra security, tabs and whatnot. Really, convincing people to switch browsers will be pretty hard now, IE is too entrenched. However, Linux is a different story - people are unhappy with Windows, users and retailers, and I think this recent WalMart deal with Lindows (which btw doesn't seem to be as bad a distro as some claim) shows this. And what is the premier browser on Linux? That'd be Mozilla.
One way to gain market share would be for a P2P Mozilla project(Sharezilla) to be started. Good file sharing software catches on quickly.
Opera 6.x has sod-all usable DHTML support. I don't know where you got this strange idea of yours, but Opera's engine is still pretty much a static one, whereas the other graphical ones are damn near all dynamic.
You state that Andreesen, the guy primarily responsible for promulgating browser technology for the masses, is wrong based on....based on what ?!?
Andreesen just wants to justify his failure and switching into the enemy's camp -- the only thing he can do to make himself look as a less of a moron is to claim that enemy is invincible.
In fact his contribution to anything other than Mosaic is negligible, and no one cares what he thinks.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Netscape 4.x does not officially supports CSS. That's why CSS sucks in Netscape.
Free Manning, jail Obama.
21% of the users in my market segment (medical education) still use Navigator 4.7x. Shudder.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
I remember back in 1999, some time after Netscape had OS'ed the code to Gecko, reading about the state of things at Netscape in the years 1996 to 1997. I remember one netscape engineer on a forum responding that the morale of the employees was in fact extremely low and a lot of people there had this fatalistic feeling about their browser and the company. he also claimed that management had basically already given up.
This last bit is interesting because I have the feeling that while Andreessen might be a good coder(although that is debatable as well considering the desaster that NS4 turned out to be), I think he has a habit of going in the wrong direction. He says that he works with MS as a partner and we all remember what happened to Realnames. It's a dicey business and not entirely risk free.
I think Mozilla has shown that in spite of the long development time OSS can provide a truly good , uptodate, standards compliant, 100% crossplatform browser, something that even MS with their IE on the Mac has not been able to achieve.
I somehow can't get rid of the feeling that he is upset that Mozilla got where it is without him.
It always surprises me that people treat Marc Andreessen as a "visionary". As I see it, he's a programmer of some talent who happened to be in the right place at the right time to be tapped by Jim Clark (the REAL visionary) to take his browser (which he did not invent, but merely polished the creation of Tim Berners-Lee) and try and make a new industry with it. Without Jim Clark (not just his money, but his business sense and entrepreneurial spirit), nobody would know Marc Andreessen today.
Out of curiosity, were you around on the Internet in 1993-1994? Marc was the lead developer who came up with this incredibly addictive toy whose usage was doubling every month and generating a huge stir. I avoided it for six months in late 1993 and early 1994 having heard how cool and addictive it was, lest I further neglect my studies. It was really the first piece of software that blended three elements: hypertext information retrieval, GUI ease-of-use, and layering that on the worldwide Internet infrastructure. (A decent account of what he did, and which elements were new, can be found at MIT's Inventor's Dimension.) Don't underestimate that GUI component, which was Marc's main contribution; it's what made the Internet accessible to the masses.
Clark was a techie turned capitalist who, having failed to figure out how to take the 3D graphics technology he had pioneered at SGI and make money in the upcoming PC 3D graphics revolution (which he foresaw, but ducked: full 3D on a chip costing $20 and selling on PCs for $30-200) was looking for some new arena where he could 'win' and turned his attention to how to make a buck on this new "Mosaic" thing. He succeeded brilliantly, but as with SGI, he never figured out how to take a technology he had pioneered and turn it into a business with a defensible end-game. Clark has some business sense but I think his virtues are a lot more a shrewd sense of timing and trends than an ability to build a sustainable business. This might be too harsh on him; perhaps it was an impossible task given his "competition": the leverage of Microsoft. But the failures at SGI and Netscape were failures of business vision and strategy, his responsibility, not failures of the technology guys, Mark Andreesen (or, say, Kurt Akeley).
I'd agree with you that Jim Clark was responsible for giving Marc the name recognition that he has today... Clark did this I presume since he recognized that anyone could go build a browser, but only one company would have the "inventor of the browser" on their staff and the insight, marketing, and recruiting advantages that would bring. Without that, Marc would only be as famous as, say, Tim Berners-Lee. You've heard of him, I notice. And I'd agree that Marc Andreesen noticed the missing pieces in part because he was at the right place at the right time, developing software at a university that was a supercomputing center hooked into the physics community of Tim Berners Lee, etc. But it was Marc who saw how to turn a hypertext system for publishing physics papers and linking footnotes into a mass medium.
Marc's vision was innovative and technical and it succeeded. Jim Clark's vision was business-oriented and capitalistic (which is no crime) and it failed after making a few rich. Now who deserves accolades as the visionary?
--LinuxParanoid, who didn't have enough vision to accept that offer to attend University of Illinois in the early 90s...
It's really rude to misquote people this way. Your editing makes it sound like I was saying something I wasn't.
Wal-Mart could have just kept on selling "naked" PCs and let the buyer both decide what to install and do the installation.
It costs them zero to put Lindows on it, so it doesn't matter if they expect any significant number of customers to use it. It's a feature they could add for free, so they did.
Find free books.
I'll counter your point by saying that Quicken was an established brand with a dedicated, loyal following in an emerging market. MS had to fight an uphill battle to try and take over Quicken, and it failed.
One could argue that Netscape was also an established brand, which they were, and MS fought an uphill battle. You will recall that they were LOSING that battle as well until IE started coming bundled with the OS. A browser is not something as "critical" as a personal finance app. So long as it works, most people are happy with whatever they're given. If it's free, so much the better.
I'll go out on a limb and say that if MS offered Windows XP and Office XP for free, Linux would be having a MUCH harder time being accepted, and may not have ever gotten to where it is today. Yes, yes, I know, I'm preaching blasphemy in the church of Linux here, but one must consider how non-interested the vast majority of consumers are in technological superiority. Unlike us tech-head, they just don't seem to give two damns. How else can you explain the existence of AOL?
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
That's not a problem, it's the solution. The next computer they get has Red Hat on it with KDE desktio default. As long as they can read their old work, surf, email and isntant message, they will be as happy as they ever were. As Andersen pointed out, the biggest factor is what browser comes with the computer.
The problem comes when you have people who have spent way too much time with Word docs and other little endless mazes M$ makes. Their work will be next to impossible to get out of their current computer, even into the latest and greatest M$ cruft. These people also resent it when all of their little shortcuts and lefthand clicks are replaced and they have to learn something different. These people can be helpful once they've lived through one or two M$ upgrades with all the loss of work. They learn, slowly, but they learn just like the rest of us have. Still, you have to get all thier junk out. Macros, VB, shudder.
People will be much easier to move in the future. Remember that it's only been a few years since PCs took everything over. What is it, 60% of PCs still have Windows 98 on them? What this means is that most people have never suffered a real M$ upgrade. After one of those, you can swap out everthing and make them just as happy as anyone.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
here he distracts the reader's amusment from M$ including actual viruses on their CDs with a swipe at BIND.
here he tells us Lindows is second rate.
here is a real gem, where he calls free software advocates stupid, retarded and pubic hairless. Nice.
here we have a pure flame that was moderated well.
Well, there you have it, a typical M$ loudmouth. The man must mod himself.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Oh come on. That is just rubbish. Methinks you wouldn't make a great strategist.
Really? Why? Because I choose a practical, realistic view of things instead of an incredibly overblown, hyped-up, Linux-will-rule-the-world view of things? Try being a pragmatist sometime. You'll find you're disappointed much less often.
You see? You've said it yourself. Linux is having outstanding success in server space, and part of the reason is because it does not play be MS's rules. It is developed and supported by multiple companies/individuals which makes it a nightmare for MS. Strategically it's fantastic because not only is it successful but there is no effective strategic response for MS to counter the attack.
If your enemy starts using weapons you haven't got which are more effective than yours, then the normal response is to try to develop equivalent or better weapons. With the GLP, it's next to impossible for MS to do that. Now that's what I call good strategy.
Rubbish? Methinks not. Linux may be having "outstanding success" by YOUR standards, and perhaps even by the standards of peer competitors, but not by MS, and certainly not in the mass corporate workspace.
Sure, polls indicate that Linux/Apache is the most popular OS/webserver combo there is -- how many of those are business sites versus personal sites? Quite a lot, actually. If you check Linux penetration into the Fortune 500 market you'd find it good, but absolutely steamrollered by MS and/or Sun no matter what yardstick you use. Linux is gaining, but to call it a success means you must qualify your statements. Apple thinks THEY'RE a success because they have 4% of the market. While they may call that a success, I call it a niche. Linux occupies a very good, very successful, somewhat-large-for-the-definition niche right now, but they are not a runaway success. Linux MAY become a runaway success, and I think it has good chances of becoming MS's only successful competitor, but not quite yet.
As to Linux not fighting on MS's turf, you're right, they're not fighting on MS's turf -- yet. But in order to enjoy the success level that MS currently resides at, Linux will have to change. It will consolidate, it will unify, and it will become less technical, more GUI, and more standardized. It will, in short, almost have to BECOME Windows to take over the server room AND the desktop. I will argue that perhaps Linux SHOULDN'T try to do this, that it should be happy with the server market and concentrate there. Unfortunately large swaths of the Linux population (especially here) seem to want to own the world, why I can't imagine.
MS owns the I.T. world right now and look what they've had to do in order to get there -- bloatware, bugs, holes, etc. Do not fool yourself into thinking Linux can somehow transcend these pitfalls because it's open source. There is nothing magical about open source that exempts it from these failings. If anything, the discontinous nature of open source development can even work against it by preventing close collaboration (yes, I know, it CAN also work the other way, but it depends on disparate parties working together for the common good, and that doesn't always work either). And don't throw the old "you've got the source so you can fix it yourself" ploy out there. Programmers, as a percentage of users, are small in number. Most of them have other jobs to do besides delving into SOMEONE ELSE'S poorly documented, poorly written, poorly understood code, trying to fix a bug somewhere. It may be neat now, but it's anything but neat when you've got a project to finish and a deadline to meet.
The truth is not pretty, but it is reality.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
As much as I cringe saying this, two words, America Online. AOL/TimeWarner has already started testing a Mozilla based browser for their Compuserve division. If Mozilla pans out as a competitive browser (which it looks to me like it is) I could see AOL/TimeWarner deciding to switch the rest of their user base over. They are in a tizzy with M$ right now and considering they, and this would be a way for them to poke M$ in the eye. Considering they are the largest internet provider in the US that would make a big impact.
Oh, and you should probably say with the OS's 95% of the world is using. Windows alone has closer to, or less than, 90%, it is only when you add Mac OS do you get to that 95% mark.
Disclamer - Opinion of Person
My wife has, and she's about as un PC savvy as they come. As long as she can shop online with it and send & receive e-mail (using evolution) then she is happy. Both applications work as well as their MS counterparts.
Let's keep something in mind here, folks: Marc Andreessen is not a neutral party when observing the next-generation browser war. The current Netscape is based on Mozilla -- it's no longer "his" Netscape. This, I think, is the same line of thinking that got JWZ so upset about the Mozilla project. Netscape, while employing people like Andreessen and Zawinski, produced a first-generation browser that swept across the market because it was the only one there, but quickly got taken down by a company with monopoly power in the desktop market. This time around, Netscape has a better browser than Microsoft, but it's not the one they helped build. Sounds like a recipe for sour grapes to me -- or at least an apathetic attitude.
In the end, though, Microsoft didn't win the browser war -- open standards did.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
IDG: How about just the idea of having an open source browser, the Opera Web browser for instance...
:p
Anyone have the tarball handy?
NGWave - Fast Sound Editor for Windows
MSIE used to have the ability to turn off javascript. Why was this feature removed?
What are you talking about?
Tools | Internet Options | Security (tab) | Custom Level (button)
Under 'Active Scripting', select disable. While it's possibly confusing that they call it "active scripting" instead of JavaScript (probably because IE supports client-side VBScript too... *twitch*), the option is in the same place it's always been.
I like my women like my coffee... pale and bitter.
1) A better browser than Netscape
2) Free as in beer
IE was integrated with win95B against court order and vendors were prevented from installing Netscape at that time. So technically, it's true, IE's rise started before 98. That is was because of anti-competitive practices has not only been proven in court, it's intuitively obvious.
He claims that Netscape 4.x was and is slow and unstable. My experience is different.
There's more, but it's not really worth digging into. Anyone who's used Mozilla, even a Win32 impared version, and IE knows which one is easier to use and better for the user. I'm happy to point out the other silly things that Verizon Guy has said before. It just goes to show the kind of person who posts IE is great trash every time a story mentions the Netscape. Roads should have signposts, dangerous materials, warning lables, but trolls leave their own posts as warnings.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Cheer up, there are plenty of services and features that M$ will never offer. As their current marketing model requires them to be root on your machine, security and privacy and all the best practices to achieve them will never be implemented on an M$ encumbered computer. Witness the lack of real user accounts, embeded file premisions and the XP EULA which gives M$ the right to "upgrade" components at will and inspect for copyright infringing material. My my my, what can you do?
As Anderson pointed out, the browser wars were won when M$ made their browser the default and forbade their vendors from including Netscape. Predatory behavior, there is no doubt that the computing industry as a whole has suffered tremendous losses and we are all much poorer from it. Today slashdot has an article about VOIP phones. Six years ago I saw things like that run under windows 3.1, used by a fellow LSU graduate student who used a simple microphone and speaker set up to talk to his family in Finland. Why is it that such things are not common today? Could it be because M$ was bussy denying such services while they got together their goofey NetMeeting program which leaves the micrphone and camera on by default? Way to to!
If the downsides of M$ software are not enough to switch you over to free software, free software's performance will be. That's the good news. There's a whole universe of great software out there that can be had for little or no cost that beats the crap out of M$ junk.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
this is a website only product, at least in my area...
That's because Wal*Mart is the larger part of an oligopoly); for many people in America, it is the only store within 50+ miles. If K-Mart follows Wal*Mart's lead, MS will have to deal with an arguably stronger trust than itself.
However, superstores like Wal*Mart and K-Mart are not sigificant resellers of computers (especially in these days of mail-order --Dell and Gateway for example-- and online shopping). In less populated areas, the superstores may suceed in spreading GNU/Linux over Windows, but that won't change the American market much (and I don't think we'll see any sucess even in those remote areas).
I believe MS products will be defeated by three factors in the next ten years:
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
another possible factor:
The embedding of non-MS operating systems into devices (other than desktops), coupled with
The End of the Desktop Computing Era (many believe that in a few years we will see specialized devices replace desktop computers).
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
Oh, I agree they're guilty.. Just not in the arena of OS manipulation. ^__^
You need a FREE iPod Nano
it wasn't as much his work on Mozilla, but he had lots of tutorials and kept the "new sites" list, which back then was the primary source of information about the web (it was before indexes and search engines).
Basically, he did a lot of competent "advocacy" work.