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> Microsoft couldn't beat Intuit Quicken with MS Money but they did crush Netscape with IE. Microsoft tightly integrated IE with Windows, leveraging their OS m

by mcknz 11y ago

> Microsoft couldn't beat Intuit Quicken with MS Money but they did crush Netscape with IE. Microsoft tightly integrated IE with Windows, leveraging their OS monopoly in order to beat Netscape. I don't believe MS built a superior product.

ksk 11y ago
>I don't believe MS built a superior product. Whether you do or don't believe it, it's whether they did, and yes they did. Users overwhelmingly chose to not purchase Netscape products which killed their revenue and shut down the company. The competition was free vs paid, and as often happens, paid will fail. If it was free vs free, maybe Netscape would have had a shot.
- mcknz 11y ago
  Microsoft had the luxury of offering it for free because of revenue from Windows and Office. I could agree that the browsers were at least comparable, until Netscape disappeared and MS had little incentive to improve IE. Which led to feature stagnation until the Firefox rose from the ashes...
smitherfield 11y ago
It has a well-deserved bad reputation now, but Internet Explorer 3-6 were, pretty indisputably, far superior products to the competition from Netscape. And not just because they were free and bundled with Windows. Of course the undead Netscape-as-Firefox would later end up for its own part becoming far superior to IE6 back in IE's near-abandonware period.
blakeyrat 11y ago
IE won the competition on Apple Macintosh where both browsers were competing on even footing. (Neither was associated with the OS maker; Apple shipped both on system CDs.) I 100% believe IE 5 was a far superior product than the competing Netscape 4.x. Previous to IE 5, maybe it's debatable.
cmrdporcupine 11y ago
I don't know if you were around then, or just speaking out of MS hate... but in the late 90s IE was the superior product. So much so that I often missed it because I was a Linux user and so didn't have access to it; Netscape had gotten really really terrible. Until Firefox came out the better option was IE. I worked in a shop in 2000/2001 that was doing early Ajax type stuff (for a dashboard that controlled some embedded hardware.) It wasn't possible to port it to Firefox even at that point, even at that point IE had some leg up. Later, MS let IE6 bit rot forever. And it was loathsome.
babuskov 11y ago
I remember well when IE 5 came out. I really, really wanted to use Netscape 4 but IE 5 was just so much better.

by mcknz 11y ago

ksk 11y ago

>I don't believe MS built a superior product. Whether you do or don't believe it, it's whether they did, and yes they did. Users overwhelmingly chose to not purchase Netscape products which killed their revenue and shut down the company. The competition was free vs paid, and as often happens, paid will fail. If it was free vs free, maybe Netscape would have had a shot.

mcknz 11y ago
Microsoft had the luxury of offering it for free because of revenue from Windows and Office. I could agree that the browsers were at least comparable, until Netscape disappeared and MS had little incentive to improve IE. Which led to feature stagnation until the Firefox rose from the ashes...

smitherfield 11y ago

It has a well-deserved bad reputation now, but Internet Explorer 3-6 were, pretty indisputably, far superior products to the competition from Netscape. And not just because they were free and bundled with Windows. Of course the undead Netscape-as-Firefox would later end up for its own part becoming far superior to IE6 back in IE's near-abandonware period.

blakeyrat 11y ago

IE won the competition on Apple Macintosh where both browsers were competing on even footing. (Neither was associated with the OS maker; Apple shipped both on system CDs.) I 100% believe IE 5 was a far superior product than the competing Netscape 4.x. Previous to IE 5, maybe it's debatable.

cmrdporcupine 11y ago

I don't know if you were around then, or just speaking out of MS hate... but in the late 90s IE was the superior product. So much so that I often missed it because I was a Linux user and so didn't have access to it; Netscape had gotten really really terrible. Until Firefox came out the better option was IE. I worked in a shop in 2000/2001 that was doing early Ajax type stuff (for a dashboard that controlled some embedded hardware.) It wasn't possible to port it to Firefox even at that point, even at that point IE had some leg up. Later, MS let IE6 bit rot forever. And it was loathsome.

babuskov 11y ago

I remember well when IE 5 came out. I really, really wanted to use Netscape 4 but IE 5 was just so much better.