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Microsoft Tried To Buy Netscape: Suppose They Had?
Glyn Moody writes "In an interview, Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript and currently CIO at Mozilla, reveals that Microsoft tried to buy Netscape at the end of 1994. They were turned down because the offer was too low, but imagine if Netscape had accepted: no browser wars, no open Web standards, no Mozilla, no Firefox. How might the Web — and the world — have looked today if that had happened?"
By now it's just not important.
We still would have had Google Chrome.
That's a pretty slippery slope. Obviously there probably would have been no Mozilla or Firefox, but who's to say that another browser wouldn't have emerged to start a war, or push open web standards? This is why "what if" scenarios are inherently stupid and pointless: they force you to suppose that nothing else will have changed, but that's not true. Likely another browser would have emerged to fill the void and encourage competition.
Everyone would still use Chrome. ;)
So unless something happens, like a T-800 knocking on Bill's door to force him to buy it (and we'll not know). This type of speculation seems like a waste of time.
This is kind of a silly conjecture. It's not as if some other browser wouldn't have arisen to challenge MS-Netscape.
If they had bought Netscape, then they wouldn't have bought / licensed Mosaic and would have ended up with a different browser war. There were half a dozen browser makers around at the time, Netscape was just the biggest.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
How might the Web — and the world — have looked today if that had happened?
There would have been someone else that would have filled Netscape's shoes. Someone would have built the better mousetrap to compete.
They were turned down because the offer was too low
...and how did THAT work out for Netscape the Company? History suggests (Yahoo, ahem) that Microsoft is happy to overpay to remove competitors from the landscape.
imagine if Netscape had accepted: no browser wars, no open Web standards, no Mozilla, no Firefox
The browser wars would have still happened. Remember Opera goes all the way back to 1994 and it was possible to crank out your own web browser in less than a year at that time.
Netscape wasn't the only player in the browser market. In 1994 linux users had to use something, whether konqueror, opera or any other browsers rose, a niche existed to be filled for a better web browser. Microsoft was doing a terrible job, with little competition they had little concern and left themselves wide open to be overtaken. The FOSS community would have backed a different project, and a different browser would have had to have made the same move. Everyone assumes if X company didn't exist no-one else would ever have developed something. That is a completely inaccurate assumption doubly so for FOSS projects.
Whoa, then I wouldn't have my Redhat Directory Server!?!?! (previously Netscape Directory Server)
Um, I think you mean "the offers was erroneously considered to be too low." Last time I checked, Netscape did not exist.
The initial release of Opera was 1996. It makes sense to think they'd have done so anyways; with or without two competing browsers at the time. Perhaps, Opera would be having the userbase it deserves... >1%
Why wouldn't having Microsoft be the only browser player in town (allowing them to charge for it!), cause people to basically start the Firefox project? Probably people would have just started with the Mosaic codebase instead and worked from there. Back in 1994 you didn't have to do that much to have a fully featured web browser. Those were the days before Javascript, before frames, before tables, back when inline images were a big deal. That offer would have been around the Netscape 1.0 timeframe, back when Netscape was a commercial product you were supposed to buy.
And there's one thing that's clear: There was a need for browsers that operated on platforms other than Windows.
I read the internet for the articles.
no browser wars, no open Web standards, no Mozilla, no Firefox. How might the Web — and the world — have looked today if that had happened?"
Hari Seldon would disagree. Even without Netscape, the web would have eventually realized that the healthier state was open standards and the movement would have started, maybe it would have taken more time, but sooner or later someone would have thought: "Know what? Things would be a lot better around here if instead of one big company changing the way things work whenever it wants we just decided on something and stuck with it."
"I see undead people" Warcraft III - Necromancer
Mod parent up.
Maybe Opera would be a much bigger browser today. Opera got its start in 1994 in an Norwegian telecom company, so it likely would have continued to grow if Mozilla was removed as a competitor. And perhaps would have been far more successful if it didn't have to compete against a free product.
Yeah. Everyone was writing web browsers.
Then there was KHTML and GTKHTML. GTKHTML always kind of sucked, but it did display web pages. And we all know what happened to KHTML. It turned into Webkit, the base code for pretty much every good web browser except IE, Firefox and Opera.
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<marquee behavior=scroll width=100%><blink>SUCK</blink></marquee>
"Lame" - Galaxar
On July 17, 1924 a butterfly flapped it's wings in Lanzhou, China, but imagine if it hadn't, maybe Katrina and Fukushima wouldn't have happened, maybe it would have prevented the Gulf spill.
No one knows WHAT the result of the absence of just this one butterfly is, let alone an action like described.. hell maybe my butterfly caused Netscape to refuse.
We would have slightly more malware.
Firefox would have started a lot sooner when the people at Netscape got canned and replaced by Microsoft employees?
Somebody would have developed another browser, seeing how Linux wouldn't have ever had a version of Netscape if they were run by Microsoft.
I'd rather use Visual Basic than Javascript.
My first reaction was to think that MSN (as they originally conceived it: a Microsoft-owned alternative to AOL and CompuServ) would have dominated end-users' online experiences in the 90s.
But Netscape was not the only other graphical browser available in those days. There was still NCSA Mosaic, which (despite its family connection to Netscape) would not have fallen into Microsoft hands and would have remained available for users. Even though in the real world Mosaic quickly stagnated, got licensed to MS after all, and died; in this alternate reality it could have become the nexus for development of the web that Netscape was. Or perhaps Opera might have, coming along shortly after.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
And there's your answer. The fact is, IE was completely stagnant before there was "real" compitition, slow, unstable, a security nightmare. *SOMETHING* would probably come, eventually, and dislogdged IE as Mozilla did, probably Google Chrome or some such, (Yes, I know Opera has been around for QUITE a while, but they just weren't in the race until *after* the IE grip was broken) but how many years did it take for IE to loose enough market share that coding *for* it's broken standards instead of to the actual standards made sense?
My guess is it would have delayed the maturation of the web by another 5-10 years. Even worse, when the US was going through the initial Patriot Act happy-fun-time and every telephone company was tripping over themselves to hand over private data, if IE had been unchallanged then, would we (being the US Public, not the Slashdot/Geek-fu public) all have gotten used to Authorized Government Reporting, logs of our browser use auto-transmitted to MS or some "secure" agency?
A bit tin-foil hat, I agree, but still...
Long-Comment-Short, I can't see the Web having ditched the IE stagnation if the code for what would become Mozilla had been sold to MS before it had a chance to be set free.
Microsoft was buying Netscape just to screw it and shut it down. M$ evidently decided it was more profitable overall to just kill Netscape the way it did, with all monopolist crimes M$ was convicted of in 1999 - by which time Netscape was dead, because it worked.
But if M$ had bought Netscape in 1994, by the late 1990s the same people in and around Netscape would have been inspired to start a free, competing project like Mozilla - which would have produced something like Firefox as Mozilla did.
These "single turning points" are no match for the overwhelming flow of the rest of events. Which pressure the global Internet for alternatives to the main choice. That diversity and low barrier to entry are the main advantages to the Internet.
Even Microsoft isn't big, powerful or evil enough to stop that.
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make install -not war
If not Netscape, then Notscape. There were plenty of other companies ready to take the space of Netscape, had Netscape vanished. It would have been a three-week delay.
In a world where Netscape was bought by Microsoft?
NAZIs on Dinosaurs fighting sword-wielding sexbots!
every good web browser except IE, Firefox and Opera.
In other words, Safari and Chrome (and chrome-based browsers like Iron)?
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
How did it work out? Instead of taking Microsoft's lowball offer, Netscape had a $half-billion IPO, the biggest of all time, and the one that still defines "big IPO" a decade and a half (and two or three bubbles) later. Then Netscape was bought by AOL for even more scads of money, which let AOL do to Netscape what Microsoft wanted for less money. So, given the equivalent other results, turning down Microsoft made Netscape's shareholders (including the corporation itself) a lot more money.
But the results were not equivalent. Instead, Netscape forced the Internet to be cross-platform in ways that outlasted even Netscape Inc. According to its own agenda, not Microsoft's (extremely limited and lame one). And Netscape Inc lasted years longer, producing major innovations like Netscape Commerce Server and Netscape Directory Server (among others). Which again set the direction of the entire Internet for at least the next decade and a half (and counting).
In every way you can consider Netscape did the right thing. What could you possibly have been thinking was bad for "Netscape the Company" by turning down Microsoft?
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make install -not war
It was Microsoft that brought a lot of the really big innovations to the web like DHTML and XmlHttpRequest. The question is would they have still done that if they didn't have a big competitor. It's been proven over and over again that Microsoft isn't motivated to improve a product unless under external pressure.
Back then swing basically didn't work.
So any browser written in Java wouldn't work ether.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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So if Netscape was taken off the market, my guess Sun would have helped produce a browser written in Java.
Perhaps Java on the desktop would have turned out differently. I still think the outdated and never updated VM in the old Netscape killed Java on the desktop before it even had a chance to take off. Everybody remembers seeing "Starting Java..." on the status bar, followed by the inevitable crash of the browser. Even when it worked, we had to target JDK 1.1 for years even though far better versions had been released.
Godaddy is a scam and a ripoff.
"In 1994, a team of Java developers started writing WebRunner, which was a clone of the internet browser Mosaic. It was based on the Java programming language. ... WebRunner's first public demonstration was given ... in 1995. Renamed HotJava, it was officially announced in May the same year ... It was the first browser to support Java applets, and was Sun's demonstration platform for the then new technology. ... HotJava had somewhat limited functionality compared to other browsers of its time. More critically, HotJava suffered from the performance limitations of Java virtual machine implementations of the day (both in speed and in memory consumption) and was consequently quite slow."
There was Opera out there... Maybe it would have arose to challenge MS if it hadn't consistently been drowned out by the noise those two made...
The BLINK tag would still be alive and well, and css margins would be backwards. Oh, and and it would probably use a bastardized version of VB rather than java.
Also, Richard Stallman would be leading a small band of hearty outlaws and revolutionaries, seeking the downfall of the Forces of Evil. In other words, business as usual.
You are missing all of the little Webkit based mobile browsers. The iOS browser is not exactly Safari and the Android browser is not exactly Chrome. I believe the browser that the Nokia N900 runs is a Webkit based not-Chrome, not-Safari browser too.
Valve's Steam client uses Webkit, built right into Steam.
The next big version of the Evolution email client is using Webkit for HTML mail rendering.
Webkit gets used in a lot of places.
I guess some people must have short memory. The competing browser to Netscape was MOSAIC (free). First versions of IE stated they were based on MOSAIC if I remember correctly.
That's a good point. I'd forgotten about the mobile market.
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
Nokia's S60 browser and the Blackberry browser also use WebKit, as do the Android and WebOS browsers. Recent versions of OmniWeb also use it. There are a lot of small browsers for various platforms written using it as well, for example the AROS browser. There used to be quite a few Gecko-based ones, but WebKit is a bit more modular and easier to embed so fewer people are writing new ones and minority browsers have a habit of becoming abandoned after a few years.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Chrome would Rule the Browser World if MS had bought Netscape.
Imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.
"We shall grapple with the ineffable, and see if we may not eff it after all." - Douglas Adams
Anyone else remember MS putting out IE 5 for HP-UX and Solaris? It was grotesque.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Back then Swing didn't exist (well, Java didn't exist, but Swing didn't exist until Java 1.2 in 1998). Java used AWT, which wrapped native controls in Java classes, rather than doing all of the rendering using Java2D (which didn't exist initially either). Java 1.0 did launch with a browser written in Java, although its name escapes me at the moment, but the main focus was on embedding Java in browsers, not browsers in Java.
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Another useless story
Who cares ?
Hey the world could have turned out to be flat! So what?
I think the web would look a little different now had Netscape sold to Microsoft, but I don't believe we would be as completely fucked as the summary would like us to believe.
1994 had more browsers than 'Netscape' - far more, and the web was completely open at the time. Yes, things would have been very different if MS had bought Netscape then, but the web != Netscape, even back then.
I believe it was called Hotjava or Hot something. That was the name of their browser for their failed JavaOS project for the Network Computer. It supported HTML 3 when it came out in 1999 or 2000 and Java 1.3. Unfortunately, they didn't market it outside of JavaOS. I did run it on Windows and I played with it and it was ok, but didn't support HTML 4 and back then loading Java sucked.
Who knows if it would have become more popular, but I forgot Sun did have that browser back then and it would have been multi platform.
http://saveie6.com/
Um, I think you mean "the offers was erroneously considered to be too low." Last time I checked, Netscape did not exist.
Was Microsoft willing pay $75/share? That's what Netscape hit a year later at IPO. The final outcome is most irrelevant. A price is "too low" if it is more profitable to hold on to the shares and sell at a later date.
But the results were not equivalent. Instead, Netscape forced the Internet to be cross-platform in ways that outlasted even Netscape Inc.
The Internet and the Web were cross-platform before Netscape. What do you think Netscape contributed, out of curiosity?
no open Web standards, no Mozilla, no Firefox... just Hawaiian suits!
c'mon man... this reeks of a waste of time.
What about consoles and embedded devices? Many of them use Presto (Opera)? The Wii, PS3, portable consoles...
I read Jim Clark's book "Netscape Time" many years ago and don't remember him mentioning anything about an offer from MS to buy the company. Also, Bill Gates published "The Road Ahead" in 1995 which famously made no reference to the HTML or the WWW, and only mentioned TCP/IP in passing (in the original printing of the book, anyway). Windows '95 was launched in the summer of 1995 with no web browser. In December of that year, months after the launch of Netscape Navigator had started the dot-com gold rush, Gates sent out his "Internet Tidal Wave" email to all MS employees, announcing an abrupt change in the company's direction because of Netscape. In a later interview, Gates explained the occasion for the memo: "We looked at each other and said, wow... Internet!" In other words, Netscape had caught Gates and the rest of MS senior management (the same folks who would've been involved in an acquisition) completely off guard.
While there was no mention of an acquisition offer from MS, Clark's book does cover the IP lawsuit from Andreesen's alma mater (UIUC) in great detail, and also UIUC's deal with a company called Spyglass which turned around and sold Microsoft rights to the Mosaic source, jump-starting IE development.
Exactly, it is a cycle. With any monopoly eventually they get fat and lazy and put out a crappy product. That in turn presents an opportunity for a startup to enter the market.
I believe IE today is holding the web back 5 - 10 years. IE 6 came at the worst time as average joes with their Windows PCs took over the WWW. If MS bought out Netscape back in 1994 when the Unix geeks controlled the vast majority of internet usage you can bet immediately another browser, Mosiac or otherwise would replace Netscape and quickly catch up.
By the time 2001 when came, there would be many different browsers and the newcombers running Windows could not take 90% marketshare with IE/Netscape 6. The internet today would have looked more like an IPAD with fancy html 5 and graphics with advanced effects. Today IE 8 is holding it back as it owns 25% of the market so webmasters can't do the cool tricks and the 75% have to wait until IE 8 has below 10% marketshare. With Windows 7 becoming the next XP that will be a very very long time. Sigh
http://saveie6.com/
Because that is a SCARY thought!
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/networking/firefox-partners-with-the-evil-empire/1579
Wikipedia lists about 30 WebKit based browsers.
Of course "good" is relative, but most other browsers I've heard of (Epiphany, Flock, iCab and Konqueror) all use WebKit these da
Other than that, nothing would have changed. A competing browser would have been called Sloxo Gigazoom or some other dumb open source project name, but history would have played out the same.
Advice: on VPS providers
Wow... can you imagine what an epic mess it would have been if the buggy mess that was Nutscrape would have been the de-facto standard? Ugh.
MS saved ALL our bacon when they made IE. I still get the heeby-jeebies thinking about how terrible Nutscrape was.
To claim there would've been no browser wars is ridiculous. Just because it wouldn't have been Firefox, doesn't mean there wouldn't have been browser wars. Opera? Konquerer? Or hell, at the time Mosaic? Had Netscape gone away, I guarantee Mosaic would've filled the void... and probably better because it had none of the ungodly bloat that they piled into Netscape. Are you forgetting that Webkit (basis of Safari and Chrome) have nothing to do with firefox?
If it was 1996 or 1997, perhaps not too much different. But in 1994, that would change everything. That predates HTML 2, the first attempt at standardizing it. It predates Apache, Javascript and CSS. Late 1994 predates the web presences of Amazon, Craigslist, the New York Times, and Dell.
The only well-visited site I can think of still in existence was the whitehouse.gov, and it was extremely primitive. Here's a mirror:
http://www.iterasi.net/openviewer.aspx?sqrlitid=lqkszdizgkk3n6kga5zzja
Basically, if Microsoft was able to redirect web development that early, they'd go for something very similar to what ActiveX was for vendor lockin. HTML would remain primitive, broken, and discarded. To make anything more than what was available, you would basically use Microsoft systems over HTTP.
Instead of HTML, you'd use something like Visual Studio to create forms and graphics via drag-and-drop and upload .rc files with Access/VBScript like background controls. Video would be embedded as Microsoft Media Server (MMS) and would run locally.
Taking that out to 2011, it'd probably be similar but sandboxed, and using a lot more XML. But nevertheless, you'd basically only be able to browse the web from OSS with something like WINE -- basically, a emulator/compatibility layer developed from a lot of reverse engineering that wasn't 100% reliable.
Back then swing basically didn't work.
That would imply it does now...
..seeing as most website duhsigners totally ignore the original point of the browser arranging the content to suit the display device, the web would _look_ much the same, it would just be a different form of HTML being tied in knots.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
You are dangerously close to having your geek credentials revoked for saying IE is a good browser.
PS3 uses NetFront afaik which is basically the same as the Dreamcast browser. I believe it's used in a bunch of other embedded products.
If microsoft had purchased netscape they would have lost the USA vs microsoft antitrust case. Thus been broken up. Cause internet explorer being bundled with windows was a big reason the case was brought up.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Well, my guess is, if Microsoft had created their browser based on Netscape, things wouldn't be such bad for IE, and for web developers.
Obviously, there would have been no browser wars if Netscape was absorbed into MS right at the start. Instead, the age of web tech stagnation would have started in 1995 with the alternative universe "IE 1", rather than 2000-1 with IE 6. Soon thereafter, one of the other open(ish) engines would likely have been employed to fulfill the needs that have been largely met by Gecko.
So, all else being equal, I don't know that we'd notice much practical difference.
Luke, help me take this mask off
So MS didn't buy Netscape. They just destroyed it, and for many years, MSIE was basically the new Netscape. Furthermore, in destroying Netscape, MS made for themselves a browser which was, at the time, quite good. So thought strangling Netscape cost them some money, there was a payoff: a well-written (as opposed to Netscape 4) modern browser.
What would they have done had they bought Netscape? They would have declared victory in browser space ten years earlier. Remember how it worked out for MS when they announced that they're going to stop releasing major upgrades for IE (because they thought the browser market was theirs)? That's when the open source rabble really moved in. So why should we think the same scene wouldn't have played out ten years earlier? It might have been a wonderful thing for the open web.
There was a leaked MS memo back in the day that mentioned MS' strategy of wiping out all competitors by 2010 and sending everyone a usage bill based on per-click licensing by that time.
That's where they wanted to go, no one has succeeded yet. They do seem to be an evil organization given their legal history with IBM, STAC, Novell, Sun, Apple, and Borland, but then again most companies probably have someone writing memos like that.
The N900 runs MicroB, a Gecko-based browser that's not exactly Firefox.
and Amazon Kindle, Arora, BOLT, Comodo Dragon, Dooble, Epiphany, Flock, iCab, Iris, Konqueror, Rekonq, Midori, Nintendo 3DS NetFront Browser, NX, OmniWeb, OWB, RockMelt, Shiira, Sputnik for MorphOS, Steel for Android, Steam ingame browser, Teashark, Ultralight for Android, Uzbl, Web Browser for Nokia Symbian smartphones, WebOS (Palm Pre), WebPositive.
The US government have made it clear that we have no inalienable rights; any we do not defend vigorously will be taken.
Hotjava It was slow but I used it as a parity check when NS4.x and IE4/IE5 had differences on how they were rendering the pages I was writing back then.
09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0
I guess Opera would have a bigger market share then.
Fran
:):):)
1st 1st Poster of the new Millennium!
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>"what if" scenarios are inherently stupid and pointless
What if X? Well, X imp Y = false imp Y = true, regardless of X.
What do you think Netscape contributed, out of curiosity?
Enough people that wouldn't accept MS's word on how HTML should work? And thus allow them to write the 'standards'.
This is a clear indication of the actual damage Microsoft has caused the industry and the world in general. It has bought many technologies and software systems burying them forever. If they had acquired Netscape we wouldn't even remember what it was and we would still be using IE 6, CSS would still be limping along, and Javascript would have disappeared--supplanted by ActiveX or some other Microsoft flavor of the year.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
That the landscape of the internet would look quite different had this come to pass is a given. What it would have looked like is a very open question. In the 1995 era, Netscape was riding high and had good technology for the time, but had an extreme case of corporate arrogance and very little business-savvy for long term planning. At this point in time, they thought they were invincible and that they would basically lock down the browser and force everyone onto their playing field. Obviously, this didn't exactly work out. They were not even bright enough in this era to be willing to license the browser to be ported to another OS with them still retaining control of the rights -- we sat in a meeting with Andreeson sometime circa late 1995 and tried to get him to agree to a port to QNX (Photon) with us paying for it, and they had zero interest and totally blew us off. About 18 months later they came back to us more or less begging us to do the same thing. Go figure. Of course, by then we had already teamed up with QNX and helped broker a deal in which they licensed the browser code-base from Spyglass which was developed into the QNX Voyager browser. Of course, this is was also where Microsoft got the IE1 code base from in their infamous licensing scheme of getting Spyglass to agree to give them the license on a royalty basis with Spyglass receiving a payment for every copy SOLD -- and with Microsoft then proceeding to GIVE it away rather than sell it. Spyglass eventually took them to court and won some cash but it was really a mere pittance by that point in time and basically destroyed the company. When we approached them in 95 Spyglass was still smarting from this and more than happy to deal with us (or basically ANYONE who was willing to actually pay cash for license rights).
The open standards would still be there. The question is would they be in widespread use or not?
Somehow i think the 'movement' towards open standards would still be there, and we may still be at the point we are today, or at least not far from it.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
In 1995, Microsoft came back to Netscape with another proposal: dividing the market. If Netscape would stop developing its browser for Windows, then Microsoft would leave the Mac and Unix markets entirely to Netscape.
Netscape declined, of course, and so in 1996 came the first release of Internet Explorer for Mac and the announcement of Internet Explorer for Unix.
It seems crazy today to think that Microsoft would have been interested in something so blatantly antitrust as dividing the market, but that's the kind of company they were back then.
Here is a timeline I like to use...
Its funny how so many people forget what happened in these days.
IE wasn't really superior until it started to leapfrog Netscape a few generations.
Otherwise it was hard to compete with a free browser.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/Timeline_of_web_browsers.svg
"Brendan Eich .. reveals that Microsoft tried to buy Netscape at the end of 1994"
That's hardly news to those of us following the browser wars. After failing to get an exclusive deal on Netscape, Microsoft tried to negociate an exclusive license from NCSA. Failing that they licensed a browser from Spyglass promising to pay them for evey copy sold. Subsequently MS gave away the browser and ended up in court with Spyglass.
link
link
"yea, you guys are going to fuck us eventually", Thomas Reardon, Mosiac Communications Corp, September 26, 1994
Had MS bought Netscape, chances are that whatever browser they'd have come up with would have still been alive today. AOL bought the company for other things, not the browser, and ultimately after coming up with several brain damaged versions, ultimately just copied Firefox in version 9, before shutting it down.
Of course, had MS bought Netscape, there may never have been a Firefox, since the browser wouldn't have been open sourced. In which case, it remains an open question whether Google Chrome would have been developed or not. But MS would have still had competition from Apple, and on the Linux side of things, browsers like Konqueror might have been the norm.
Incidentally, does AOL still own the Netscape brand name, or can it be used by anyone who wants it?
And once again, people seem to have forgotten that Opera exists just fine without Netscape...