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MS Says Longhorn To Arrive 2005
Lawrence Person writes "According to this article in PC World, Microsoft 'publicly confirmed 2005 as the release year for Longhorn, the successor to Windows XP.' And of course, we all know tha Microsoft release dates never slip..."
Windows 98 integrated IE into its operating system (and still is to date) to eliminate competition from Netscape. That is the reason IE is everywhere, not because Netscape was slacking on Mozilla as you suggested. If Mozilla was better than IE in terms of ease of use (for the people using windows, IE was just there, and was convenient to use), Mozilla would have come up ahead of IE. But the fact of the matter is (and the DOJ ruled on this) that Microsoft was using anti-competitive behavior to drive competition away from Netscape.
"You had this look that of an angel, it was such a bad disguise" --Dishwalla
"Windows 98 integrated IE into its operating system (and still is to date) to eliminate competition from Netscape."
One could make the argument that KDE is doing the same thing with Konqueror. The reason that nobody's crying foul on that, though, is because there are better browsers out there and people will go find them. In MS's case, they had the better browser. Why go download a browser when IE's doin the job? If MS had a shoddy browser like Konqueror (well Konq's not that bad, but bear with me) people'd flock to Netscape and there'd be none of this nonsense over MS trying to secure a monopoly via the browser.
Yeah yeah, convicted monopoiist, whatever. There's still strong reason to have IE and Explorer use the same interface. Why make browsing the web (the killer app for Windows 95 and even 98) such a different experience from browsing around on your commputer? KDE does this. They seem to think it works too. Plus, HTML can be used to customize the interface. All kinds of benefits here.
So yeah, MS may have been shitty about putting IE on there and making the competition's battle harder to fight, but the reason to make IE what it was in relation to Windows was a predictable evolution of the OS. IE's rendering engine is very versitile. You can throw HTML, Text, JPEGS, Flash, and a bunch of other objects at it that the web has caused to become standard, and it'll view it. (Not to mention the plugin support...) Why rewrite all that when you can modularize it and have a bunch of apps call the same thing?
Long story short, IE's bundling with Win98 may have dealt a death blow to Netscape, but there's enough reason to believe that wasn't MS's sole reason to include IE.
"Derp de derp."