> Netscape seems to have opened the flood gates with their "commoditize the browser, and make money selling servers" approach. Netscape originally charged for

> Netscape seems to have opened the flood gates with their "commoditize the browser, and make money selling servers" approach. Netscape originally charged for their browser. They only switched to this business model after Microsoft began giving away IE for free. Netscape couldn't compete with a free browser, especially not when that browser is included with the most popular desktop OS in the world, so they came up with the idea of using the browser as a loss leader for their server product. Before IE, the only free browsers were the terrible TCP/Connect II-based browsers that various ISPs, such as AOL and Interramp, bundled with their service. Netscape was able to position Navigator as a premium offering, as the TCP/Connect II browser was horrendously slow and feature-bare. Navigator, meanwhile, was adding proprietary extensions to HTML such as tables, frames, the font tag, and blinking text (yes, <blink> was considered a selling point back then), it was fast for its time, and it had a toolbar with some useful features (like a button that took you to a search engine; I think Infoseek was the default). But IE had their own proprietary extensions, and it was about as good as Navigator, so Navigator was no longer the sole premium product.