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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?"
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.
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.
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.
By now it's just not important.
Agreed
We still would have had Google Chrome.
Do you think Microsoft would have allowed Google to flourish?
May have allowed them to start up, but then would have bundled search engine into the OS, so Windows would have been even more bloated.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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
Learning from the past by asking "what if?" is important.
Maybe not to you. So ignore the story. But to others. Whose insights contribute to the world you live in. Sure, you're a freeloader, but at least don't get in their way.
Some nerds are really dumbdowners.
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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 we would still have Safari running on iPads.
The trenders these days are Chrome on computers and Safari on tablets (and to some extent Android Browser). IE and Firefox are on downward slopes.
Slashdot is the 4chan of tech sites. Don't let it get to you.
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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It's only possible today because of the current state of the Web. A web locked-down by Microsoft from 1994 up to today would have resulted in a locked-down network where only Microsoft products are allowed to access it, ActiveX everywhere, etc.
Heck, don't people remember those IE-only websites? That wasn't even a decade ago!
Just be glad that Netscape didn't sell out.
KHTML=>Safari=>Webkit=>chrome
What exactly would an analysis of history lead us to believe that it wouldn't have happened?
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
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.
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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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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It's a bug and a feature!
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
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Thanks. But I've been letting it get to me just enough to righteously flame numbskull nerds since about 1998.
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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.
1. Chrome trend is at a whooping 20% http://thenextweb.com/google/2011/07/01/google-chrome-has-20-market-share-firefox-in-its-sights/
2. I have yet to see safari on a tablet, name one that ain't an ipad
3. Nobody uses the Android browser LOL, firefox or [there's one more good one somewhere] are the popular choices.
If MS bought Netscape, I think this might have gone different... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft
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.
And we would still have Safari running on iPads.
Sorry, but that is a remarkably naive statement. If Microsoft had cornered the market on the primary interface used to access "the Internet", it is very possible, likely, even, that "the Internet" would be a very different place. Easily different enough to have had a profound impact on all the technologies that use it, and by extension, on those entities that developed those technologies. To suggest that this or that client application would have evolved unchanged by such a different reality is, well..., naive.
It's only possible today because of the current state of the Web. A web locked-down by Microsoft from 1994 up to today would have resulted in a locked-down network where only Microsoft products are allowed to access it, ActiveX everywhere, etc.
Heck, don't people remember those IE-only websites? That wasn't even a decade ago!
Just be glad that Netscape didn't sell out.
A decade ago? How about an hour ago while I was in the office..... IE only websites are definitely NOT a thing of the past yet.
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.
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"Do you think Microsoft would have allowed Google to flourish?
" .doc formats in Word to force Office. MS excells at this (no pun intended) but the WWW is a different beast. As long as something is somewhat open alternative will pop out and once that happens the monopolists no longer writes the rules and controls the market.
You can't control the market of search providors like you can with Word. MS would have to rewrite w3c and lock html, encrypt it with proprietary protocols not based on HTTP, and do crazy shit to kill all competition. It is not like controlling the
There would be another browser if it were not for Firefox.
In 1994 there were 4 browsers out there. Some were as good as Mosaic too and I used one that I can't remember the name of which was made by a lawyer organization. Anyway, Netscape was the best one and it didn't win until the late 1990s.
What would have happened is another browser would have come by. IE 6 was ok in 2001, but security holes, and terrible development efforts to get anything done in it created the fuel for Mozilla Phoenix (later Firefox). Konqueror was created on Linux that was starting to become popular which is what webkit is based off of (engine of Chrome).
Mac users also would have used a different browser altogether as IE did not exist on the mac until 1998 if I recall. Was there even a MacOS8 or MacOS9 version before MacOSX? I do not recall as I was an NT user then. Someone can correct me if I am wrong as I didn't use macs then but it stands my point. Linux was more popular and so was Unix 10+ years ago in the workstation market and they would have used a different browser or a Gnu based one would come about that would be ported to all operating systems such as Konqueror. Universities were not all NT and Windows based like today and these CS and engineering students were most of the internet users anyway in the mid 1990s. Not the general public.
When MS had 90% of the market in the dark days of 2004 - 2006 demand for a way out corrected it. Many people do not like control by one company. Firefox was born. I just remembered Opera does exist and is popular in Russia and Eastern Europe. Perhaps, that would be the new norm? Demand exists outside of the workplace who do not want one company, one standard, one way of doing things etc.
IE 6 did make much of the web proprietary and started the intranets that can't be upgraded today that we all loathe, but MS attempts at proprietarization failed. Too many people need the net on many devices which means standards and more browsers hence the race for HTML 5.
http://saveie6.com/
It isn't learrning from the past. It is making stuff up and then launching into wild conjecture from that fictional starting point.
1. Chrome trend is at a whooping 20% http://thenextweb.com/google/2011/07/01/google-chrome-has-20-market-share-firefox-in-its-sights/ 2. I have yet to see safari on a tablet, name one that ain't an ipad 3. Nobody uses the Android browser LOL, firefox or [there's one more good one somewhere] are the popular choices.
If MS bought Netscape, I think this might have gone different... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft
I use the android browser. Mainly because when I hit sites with firefox I get the full version usually and with the android browser I get the slimmed down "mobile" version. Wish it wasn't the case, though.
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
No, you just don't know how to ask "what if?" questions about the past. Try looking at some of the actually insightful comments in this thread.
Or don't. If not, at least stay out of the way while the rest of us do something useful here. Play with some porn or something 100% reliable.
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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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The problem is that this "what if" is extremely dumb and started from a flawed premise "no browser wars, no open Web standards", At the time this all started up there was a miriad of browsers out there, however between the 2 propriety browsers of Microsoft and Netscape they killed them all off, the truth is we will never know whether the browser wars were beneficial or detrimental to the web eco system, perhaps without that war all the other browsers would have have flourished into a vibrant and stable eco-system bringing about a web nirvana instead of withering and dying, we will never know and don't have enough information to make usefull "what if" statements to learn from the past in this case.
2. I have yet to see safari on a tablet, name one that ain't an ipad
Er? Since Safari is an Apple product why would you expect to see it on a tablet that isn't an Apple product? WebKit which is at the core of Safari is used by other tablets like Xoom, PlayBook, and Galaxy Tab.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
It's usually modded down to -1.
Usually.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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.
We would have had a $50 web browser with web technology protected by 73 Netscape patents acquired by Microsoft (including blatantly obvious patents they could exploit elsewhere, such as one for just making a menu bar hide, or showing how complex a password is while you type it in - used by many sites right now)
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.
im sure links to it has, after all ive seen shock sites here
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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?
The standard browser on Unix was XMosaic (possibly also on other operating systems, that I don't know) before Netscape took over. So maybe our browsers would all be Mosaic based.
Mosaic had a feature not found in Netscape, which was the ability to add annotations to web sites (personal ones worked for all web sites, shared ones AFAIK only for those which explicitly supported it). Maybe with Mosaic as dominant browser, Web 2.0 would have come much earlier, and with direct browser support.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Hotmail was basically a IE only web site like 6 years ago. Using firefox on it was a pain. I don't know about more recently though because I hardy use hotmail anymore.
> No, you just don't know how to ask "what if?" questions about the past.
Why - is there a way of asking 'what if' questions where you can predict with any useful level of reliability what would have happened?
Why stop there? Why not predict the future starting from now? No need for any uncertainty - it's easy!
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/
Except there isn't anything to learn by doing a "what if here because it wasn't MSFT that killed Netscape it was their own incompetence, just as it wasn't Mozilla that caused the surge of free browsers it was the fact MSFT screwed the pooch by saying "We won!" and then promptly firing all the IE team and letting IE 6 rot.
And lets not forget that BOTH browsers were proprietary as hell back in the day, or has everyone forgotten the innovation that was the blink tag? But then NS blew it with NS 4, that was such a buggy POS that you were lucky to get it to run at all so IE won. Then IE rotted and became a virus laden whore so Mozilla came along.
If Moz wouldn't have come along because MSFT had bought them it would have just been someone else, Opera or Safari or something based on webkit. In both cases while the press like to make it some big "battle' it was simply a case of a better product taking out a shittier one. NS4 was shitty and back in the day IE 5 wasn't bad, then IE6 became shitty and moldy so another browser came along and took some serious share. Now we are seeing this again as Mozilla becomes shitty with stupid number changing and crazy release schedules so chrome is taking share.
So I'd say the only real lesson to learn here is history repeats and companies become too insulated to learn from the mistakes of their competitors.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Many people predict the future, starting from now. What's different about that from predicting it from the past? Well, for one thing, when predicting from the past, we do know how one outcome actually came out, and some of the reasons it may have come out that way. We can compare this to alternate ways the event might have played out.
Taking stuff apart since 1969 (TM)
If the world were so unpredictable as you describe, no one would ever accomplish any of their goals. The reason that titans of industry succeed is that they can predict the outcome of their actions.
Taking stuff apart since 1969 (TM)
It's interesting because lowballing Netscape would have been the biggest single mistake in the history of Microsoft, and possibly the whole software industry.
If true, it was a bigger fuckup on Gates's part than Gary Kildall's failure to close a deal with IBM in 1980.
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
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.
..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.
I guess you didn't look at the links. Who cares that Safari is only used on iPads... iPads dominate the market. Just look at the chart:
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=1&qpcustomb=1
And as for nobody using the Android browser... again, look at the chart. 16% doesn't sound like "nobody."
What are some better ones? I'm a young'un and this is all that I'm familiar with.
That's a flawed argument. If what you said is true a large portion of the study of military science wouldn't exist. Its entire basis for developing strategies and tactics is to look at previous battles and situations and ask "what if" to figure out what would happen, and be able to apply it for future situations.
And Apple would be out of business? Regardless of what Microsoft ever did, Apple kept plugging away.
Even if the internet were somehow "different" I don't think it would preclude the advent of the iPad. The iPad (and the continuing ascendence of Macs) happened in spite of Microsoft's complete domination of most parts of the industry.
Safari (and Webkit, and thus Chrome) came from Konqueror, which started development around when this non-buyout happened. Konqueror was a relatively tiny open source project that hardly anyone had even heard of.
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.
Nope... as an historian, let me tell you: 'what if' are total bullcrap, ego posturing waste of time. From highschool to uni, any student starting a "what if" ego stroking move is shut down by the teacher. It's not smart, it's just trolling history in a poor way...
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
It is making stuff up and then launching into wild conjecture from that fictional starting point.
Are you describing "what if?" scenarios or every Slashdot discussion?
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.
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
Military battles are something that can be effectively analyzed from past experience and knowledge as they are something you can make educated assumptions about what the parties involved would do in different circumstances, you cannot even begin to construct a likely scenario for how the web market would have evolved if the netscape/MS battle never happened as you simply have insufficient information about the players involved and absolutely zero past reference or experience as to what the other parties would have done..
What would have happened if Microsoft didn't drop support for Mac when the they did? Safari came in to fill a void. The ones people are mentioning are just a few of the many out there. Beyond those, there are little projects people have done to make their own. I'd bet quite a few of us have said "how hard could it possibly be to write a rendering engine?" :)
If MSIE and Netscape never existed, would we have something now? Who knows. I can guarantee, if there's a profit to be made somewhere, someone will try. The web browser market is tough. In itself, there is no money to be made any more. People don't generally pay for their browsers. They don't pay for support. They expect a tool that does what they tell them to, and if they don't like it, they'll pick another free one. To enter and hold the market now, you have to have an alternative income source, and that income isn't going to come from the browser market, nor can you hope donations will keep it going.
MSIE is funded by Microsoft (obviously). Chrome by Google. Safari by Apple. Opera by Google (funny that, huh?). Konquorer is funded by KDE e.V. by member fees and donations. For MSIE and Safari, having a browser of their own enhances their product. Can you imagine an OS not coming with a web browser any more?
I guarantee, in 10 years, there will be new browsers in the game, and some will likely have dropped out.
Quite a few years ago, I had a boss tell me that he wanted the sites tested in "every web browser". We had a customer who complained our main site didn't look good in some browser that no one had ever heard off. I went on a quest to find "all" the web browsers. I had a beautiful collection of them, or at least those that weren't just skins on another browser. My desktop was full of icons for many of the browsers. It was horrible trying to keep up with them. At least my boss realized that "all" wasn't a reasonable request. "all" became "the major ones our customers use", so I was able to trim it down to the current versions MSIE, Netscape, and Opera. We then told the complaining user "go get a real browser." Honestly, the one he used was horrible, and didn't render anything right. It was a fun way to spend a week not doing any real work and getting paid for it. :)
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
And the whole thing misses the fact that back in the day Netscape was the proprietary anti-competitive browser. When MSIE came around many webmasters praised it for using standards and not having their own proprietary tags. In fact, we could had have way more standard web if Microsoft would have actually bought Netscape and stopped the bullshit they did. In those days MS was the frontier of open web standards.
The web went to all that state it did just because Netscape played it dirty and kept using their own proprietary stuff. But MSIE made Netscape look like shit, and it really was. It was only going slower and more bloater by every release. But let's not get facts get in the way and just hate MS because that's what all the cool kids do and don't know about history of what they're actually talking about.
Look over their site carefully, or contact them.
I couldn't find the really really slim version of Slashdot, so I asked Cmdr Taco... he replied with...
An awful lot of people use the m. subdomain. For example http://www.weatherunderground.com has http://m.wund.com/.
I made http://m.freeinternetpress.com for my mobile users (namely me). It's great for WML enabled browsers. I haven't really used it in a while, since I have my android now. The full size page loads fine on it, and the users haven't asked for a light version. I suspect if the page is too heavy, they go for the RSS feeds, since they contain the same content.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Do you think Microsoft would have allowed Google to flourish?
Yes, in exactly the same way that they did now. What difference would it make to Google if Microsoft had started with source code from Netscape rather than Spyglass Mosaic?
Digg quit being a tech site years ago.
"Ubuntu" -- an African word, meaning "Slackware is too hard for me". - stolen from Dan C alt.os.linux.slackware
In addition to that - there would have been another browser alternative popping up.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I guess Opera would have a bigger market share then.
Fran
:):):)
1st 1st Poster of the new Millennium!
For the same reason as there's a Safari for Windows?
Because it's a what if question which is close enough to reality that we might learn something interesting.
For example, a Slashdot poster might point out a modular extensible browser that was almost ready for an open source release but was killed by the open sourcing of Netscape. Alternatively, someone who was working at Microsoft at the time might post about how this completely screwed up their strategic plan for the next five years and lead to an argument between divisions which was what finally lead to the Vista debacle and Apple taking the lead in the personal computing market.
We might even end up learning something.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Tits or GTFO!
15 years ago the "web" was tiny. A web locked-down by Microsoft in 1994 would have been unlocked promptly by Sun and IBM. There other browsers besides Netscape and huge empty markets to grow into. Maybe Sun would have released a cheap or gratis version of Solaris for x86, with HotJava bundled in, only to spite Microsoft :) and Linux would have remained an enthusiasts's project.
It's very difficult to lock a market without government support.
That's absolutely ridiculous. Asking "what if?" about history is a strategy for coming to understand the mechanics of social change and upheaval. It helps those who ponder the question to understand which conditions and feedbacks shape history, and how they do so. And it's part of a toolset that makes history meaningful for anything other than trivia, as coming to understand how history is shaped—how and why societies change—is power in the hands of people who want to shape history. But go on, tell us more about how it does no good to wonder about the world we'd live in if, say, there had never been a "War on Terror".
MS would have to rewrite w3c and lock html, encrypt it with proprietary protocols not based on HTTP, and do crazy shit to kill all competition.
With total browser market control, they could certainly achieve that; and they very nearly did.
Safari is released by Apple at their whim for different OSes. They released Safari for Windows for strategic reasons that I don't know but Windows being the predominant OS for PCs may have something to do with it. What reason would they release Safari for other tablets? My understanding is that iOS Safari is not quite the same as OS X Safari. I'm just curious to know what speculation you have.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Shows how much you know about the browser market. Why do you willfully ignore all of the Linux/Unix browsers, other small time browsers, and Opera?
When it comes to portable browsing, Opera Mobile takes the cake.
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'.
Our browsers are Mosaic-based.
For one, Mosaic was the first to show images inline. For this reason alone, not only did its popularity explode, but it made the web more interesting to the average user. For another, Netscape was made by many of the original developers of Mosaic and they built on the concept. And finally, the first Internet Explorer... was a re-branded Mosaic. Every major browser since then has been built on the concept that people became familiar with because of these.
So, basically, what you suggest might have happened... happened. Well done?
Anyway, my thought is more that if Microsoft had bought Netscape in 1994, they would likely have Frankenstein-ed the two browsers together, leaving people with no choice but a single super-bloated monster rather than a choice between two regularly bloated monsters. An alternate browser would have waited for faster Internet speeds so the open source movement could take off and gain enough contributors (and bandwidth) to do something of interest to the mainstream. I say this because with no major competition and the tactics they used to come out on top in the first place, Microsoft would have no serious challengers. Maybe a few commercial browsers for niche markets (Opera is a dubious example, since nothing really makes it "niche" except that it is). Since Mozilla itself was a huge boost to the open source movement, it would likely have taken longer for an open source browser to attract enough developers to keep up with Interscape Exigator, particularly with Microsoft having all of the clout to change technologies faster (sorry... new Windows out... gotta rewrite your entire site...). Google would likely not exist (I was going to say something much less drastic, but when you really think about it, it's probably true).
Ultimately, I'm thinking the whole scenario might have been good for Apple in a way, if they'd played it right. I imagine they could have wound up with a larger share of the home computer market. Don't know if that'd be good or bad.
But we all know that changing the timeline brings unexpected results. There's a chance it'd have gone all "A new challenger appears!"
Omnes tuae crepidines sunt nobis sunt. Ascendo tuum!
Sorry, but I don't deal in "what ifs" or "could haves" or "should haves". That is NOT the past. While you're wasting time dwelling on what might have been, with absolutely no power to change anything, I'm focusing on how to make the the future better.
You are forgiven. And what if you had not made this pointless post? Well, I would not have told you that you can't make the future better without learning from the past and using your imagination. You would have gone forward bereft of the wisdom I had to impart to you. Then you might have made a fool of yourself by repeating it in the future. At the very least, you would have wondered why your efforts to make the future better were failing.
What can we learn from this?
Omnes tuae crepidines sunt nobis sunt. Ascendo tuum!
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
What the hell is Digg?
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
It is fun though!
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).
Well done. Point missed entirely.
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.
This I strongly doubt. Google started with an innovative search engine. It didn't depend at all at any advanced HTML features; indeed their interface was cheered for its simplicity. All that Web 2.0/XmlHttpRequest stuff came later.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
And Apple would be out of business? Regardless of what Microsoft ever did, Apple kept plugging away.
Well, except when Microsoft invested heavily into Apple and prevented them from going bankrupt.
Yes, I realize this. However, their work depended heavily on open source software, including Linux and Apache. Their continued success has, in part, been driven not only by their commercial work, but the continued advancement of open source software and their own contributions to such. As Google was formed the same year as the Mozilla Foundation, the boost that Mozilla gave to the open source community could be said to be a contributor to Google's meteoric rise. Without the aforementioned boost, open source would have advanced at a slower pace. Even if Google continued to be rise, it would have been slower and, instead of becoming the next giant, it would likely have gotten to a point where it was worth a LOT to bigger companies to buy out and even more worth it to Google to sell.
I didn't want to write all that when I made my initial post.
Omnes tuae crepidines sunt nobis sunt. Ascendo tuum!
Yep.
Unix had a huge marketshare of the WWW back in 1994 as average Mom and Pops didn't browse the internet. They used Prodigy, AOL, and CompuServe, assuming they would even have a computer.
Mac users too would rebel like I said in my post. Linux was tiny, but SGI and Sun were the big boys on college campuses and students telnetted into their unix boxen to browse the web too in those days.
Ms could not have that 90% marketshare as Windows internet usage was much smaller.
http://saveie6.com/
And Apple would be out of business? Regardless of what Microsoft ever did, Apple kept plugging away.
Well, except when Microsoft invested heavily into Apple and prevented them from going bankrupt.
Except, you know, that's totally not what happened. Apple had plenty of cash at the time. It was a nominal purchase of non-voting shares by Microsoft to signify their commitment to Word and Office on the Mac.
But I bet you'd also tell us how Apple 'stole' tech from Xerox as well.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
"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
IIRC, IE 5.x or something was available on Solaris, in addition to Windows. I forget whether it was ever available on the Mac.
It's really weird, I actually wasn't trolling. Two people moderated me as a troll and one moderated me insightful. It just to me an old story that has been brought up 10 years ago. BTW Netscape didn't invent the first browser. Remember Mosaic? Netscape actually hurt themselves a lot too.