4 ms·
<Shortly after the government claimed that Microsoft was a monopoly that could not be competed with> The DOJ sued Microsoft in the mid 1990s. Chrome came out i
by greedo 6y ago
<Shortly after the government claimed that Microsoft was a monopoly that could not be competed with>
The DOJ sued Microsoft in the mid 1990s. Chrome came out in 2008.
- twblalock 6y agoThe courts ruled that Microsoft should be broken up in 2000, and the case was settled without a breakup about a year later. The cases in the early 1990s were not even about the web browser, which did not exist yet -- they were about Windows licensing agreements from the 1980s.
- greedo 6y agoSo again, Chrome was released in 2008, seven years after the settlement. There was no ready alternative to Explorer at the time of the settlement.
- twblalock 6y agoNetscape Navigator and Communicator, Mozilla (the original one), and Opera all existed at the time and were trivially easy to obtain.
- greedo 6y agoNeither Netscape Navigator nor Opera were free. Mozilla took over a decade to become competitive. It wasn't until Safari and Chrome came along that there was any real competition to IE. IE was the web for a long long time.