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Spyglass didn't. Microsoft may have started from the Spyglass codebase, but I don't imagine there was much left by the time IE 4 was released. The Netscape gu
by cameldrv 6y ago
Spyglass didn't. Microsoft may have started from the Spyglass codebase, but I don't imagine there was much left by the time IE 4 was released. The Netscape guys like to talk about how Microsoft's monopolistic practices killed Netscape, but by the time of Netscape 4.6 vs. IE 4, IE was a far superior browser in speed, stability, and CSS support.
At the time, it was really Netscape's market to lose. It was not difficult to download Netscape, and in the IE 2/IE 3 era, that's what everyone did. Netscape just stopped being the best and didn't recover until Firefox was released.
- jonathankoren 6y agoI used Spyglass back in the Mosaic Communicator and Netscape 1.1N days. There was no real difference. The big draw of Mosaic Communicator over NCSA Mosaic was in-line jpegs. You could have easily replayed the world and Spyglass and Netscape’s fates would have been switched, because they had identical products in an identical market.
- cameldrv 6y agoWell things moved pretty fast back then, but in my recollection, Netscape had progressive rendering (i.e. you didn't have to wait for everything to load before the page was rendered) and Spyglass didn't. I believe IE 1.0 (derived from Spyglass) also lacked that feature. Spyglass might have worked OK on a university network, but over dialup, progressive rendering was a killer feature.