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Why was it important for Microsoft to kill Netscape? What did this have to do with continuing to dominate the desktop market? Bill should have thought harder a

Why was it important for Microsoft to kill Netscape? What did this have to do with continuing to dominate the desktop market? Bill should have thought harder about these questions before going after Netscape by giving away IE for free - the most transparent act of monopolistic predatory pricing we've seen since Benjamin Harrison signed the Sherman Antitrust Act into US law.

jonny_eh 4y ago
It delayed by a decade (or two) browser innovation. This meant that desktop apps weren't replaced with cross-platform web apps over that period. Note how now we no longer need Windows for most professional desktop applications. As much as we like to complain about JavaScript and Electron, they're largely the reason that we no longer depends on Windows for productivity.
- mananaysiempre 4y ago
  From contemporary technical documentation, it doesn’t really look like Microsoft had exactly planned to just sit on IE once it had won. That first Web push gave us XMLHttpRequest, it gave us IDispatchEx and Windows Scripting (where JScript stagnated only after the Sun settlement, enough for a next-generation version in the form of JScript.NET to get developed and consequently die[1]), it gave us HTAs (“Electron as a Windows platform feature”), DHTML (a non-standard abomination, yes, but so was <IMG>) not only implemented in IE but supported in FrontPage and Word, Active Desktop with its channels (OK, one might argue those count as a negative amount of features, but they were serious about it), the Web Publishing Wizard and the Personal Web Server (bundled with an end-user product!). This does not look like the work of people who were planning to do just enough to win and then stop—it looks like they were really into it (and they were really into a lot of things at the time, simultaneously), then came the “oh shit” realization that helping the Web eat the platform lunch is maybe not exactly in your interest[2] when that lunch is firmly yours at the moment. (Java’s attempt at same they were very consciously thwarting—can’t find that Gates memo now—but then Java was pretty explicit and deliberate about that attempt, while the Web just kind of happened to be the only leak when a lot of people started feeling around the dam for a lot of different reasons.) [1] https://ericlippert.com/2003/10/14/designing-jscript-net/ https://ericlippert.com/2003/10/14/designing-jscript-net/ [2] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost-the-api-war/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...
  - jonny_eh 4y ago
    I suppose the other issue was that IE was only available on Windows (although briefly on Macs too) and wasn't standard compliant.
    - HWR_14 4y ago
      IE on Mac was the most standards compliant browser of the time, on Windows or Mac. In fact, it's biggest flaw is that running on IE on Windows and running on IE on Mac required a lot of "different browser" code.
    - mananaysiempre 4y ago
      Only on Windows, well duh. Microsoft post-1990 stopped cross development as soon as they could, even though it’s not like they weren’t capable of it (Visual C++ 4 Cross Development Environment for Macintosh, OLE 2.0 SDK for same, COMsource and DCOM for Unix). I’ll never like it, but I can’t really blame their cold, dead moneymaking hearts for it, only myself if I ever expect anything else. I seem to remember it was due to some pretty old and involved behind-the-scenes agreements that IE for Mac even made it to 5.5, but once again finding the relevant scan on the DoJ website is beyond me. As for standards compliance, my recollections are principally of IE6 (last pre-arse-parking version) circa 2010, when it was indeed woefully behind the times. I expect that is what you are thinking of as well. But that is not the relevant characterization, is it? That would be IE6 circa 2002, and I read that at the time it broke Netscape-targeted sites because it did CSS 2 (etc.) better than Netscape, not worse. I didn’t even have an Internet connection at the time so I can’t tell firsthand (without scraping up an old Netscape or Firefox beta installer), but I can believe that.
kragen 4y ago
Now the most important platform is not Windows but Chrome (and, secondarily, Mobile Safari). That's why my technophobic mother is using Linux now, on a Chromebook. When people at Microsoft saw Netscape and Java, they understood that this would happen. But Microsoft was able to delay their irrelevance for about 15 years by sucking off Netscape's oxygen, getting the W3C to rubber-stamp IE's implementation bugs and shitty API designs as official web standards, sidetracking the W3C for years on the make-work of XML and things like RDF schemas, introducing platform-specific extensions in Visual J++, splitting the Java developer base into Java and .NET, mugging Fortune 1000 CTOs behind closed doors with patent lawsuit threats for using Linux, and shipping a really shitty broken browser for 20 years. That was long enough to kill Sun too. And now they own GitHub, which controls the namespace of most of the world's free software.

jonny_eh 4y ago

It delayed by a decade (or two) browser innovation. This meant that desktop apps weren't replaced with cross-platform web apps over that period. Note how now we no longer need Windows for most professional desktop applications. As much as we like to complain about JavaScript and Electron, they're largely the reason that we no longer depends on Windows for productivity.

mananaysiempre 4y ago
From contemporary technical documentation, it doesn’t really look like Microsoft had exactly planned to just sit on IE once it had won. That first Web push gave us XMLHttpRequest, it gave us IDispatchEx and Windows Scripting (where JScript stagnated only after the Sun settlement, enough for a next-generation version in the form of JScript.NET to get developed and consequently die[1]), it gave us HTAs (“Electron as a Windows platform feature”), DHTML (a non-standard abomination, yes, but so was <IMG>) not only implemented in IE but supported in FrontPage and Word, Active Desktop with its channels (OK, one might argue those count as a negative amount of features, but they were serious about it), the Web Publishing Wizard and the Personal Web Server (bundled with an end-user product!). This does not look like the work of people who were planning to do just enough to win and then stop—it looks like they were really into it (and they were really into a lot of things at the time, simultaneously), then came the “oh shit” realization that helping the Web eat the platform lunch is maybe not exactly in your interest[2] when that lunch is firmly yours at the moment. (Java’s attempt at same they were very consciously thwarting—can’t find that Gates memo now—but then Java was pretty explicit and deliberate about that attempt, while the Web just kind of happened to be the only leak when a lot of people started feeling around the dam for a lot of different reasons.) [1] https://ericlippert.com/2003/10/14/designing-jscript-net/ https://ericlippert.com/2003/10/14/designing-jscript-net/ [2] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost-the-api-war/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...
- jonny_eh 4y ago
  I suppose the other issue was that IE was only available on Windows (although briefly on Macs too) and wasn't standard compliant.
  - HWR_14 4y ago
    IE on Mac was the most standards compliant browser of the time, on Windows or Mac. In fact, it's biggest flaw is that running on IE on Windows and running on IE on Mac required a lot of "different browser" code.
  - mananaysiempre 4y ago
    Only on Windows, well duh. Microsoft post-1990 stopped cross development as soon as they could, even though it’s not like they weren’t capable of it (Visual C++ 4 Cross Development Environment for Macintosh, OLE 2.0 SDK for same, COMsource and DCOM for Unix). I’ll never like it, but I can’t really blame their cold, dead moneymaking hearts for it, only myself if I ever expect anything else. I seem to remember it was due to some pretty old and involved behind-the-scenes agreements that IE for Mac even made it to 5.5, but once again finding the relevant scan on the DoJ website is beyond me. As for standards compliance, my recollections are principally of IE6 (last pre-arse-parking version) circa 2010, when it was indeed woefully behind the times. I expect that is what you are thinking of as well. But that is not the relevant characterization, is it? That would be IE6 circa 2002, and I read that at the time it broke Netscape-targeted sites because it did CSS 2 (etc.) better than Netscape, not worse. I didn’t even have an Internet connection at the time so I can’t tell firsthand (without scraping up an old Netscape or Firefox beta installer), but I can believe that.

kragen 4y ago

Now the most important platform is not Windows but Chrome (and, secondarily, Mobile Safari). That's why my technophobic mother is using Linux now, on a Chromebook. When people at Microsoft saw Netscape and Java, they understood that this would happen. But Microsoft was able to delay their irrelevance for about 15 years by sucking off Netscape's oxygen, getting the W3C to rubber-stamp IE's implementation bugs and shitty API designs as official web standards, sidetracking the W3C for years on the make-work of XML and things like RDF schemas, introducing platform-specific extensions in Visual J++, splitting the Java developer base into Java and .NET, mugging Fortune 1000 CTOs behind closed doors with patent lawsuit threats for using Linux, and shipping a really shitty broken browser for 20 years. That was long enough to kill Sun too. And now they own GitHub, which controls the namespace of most of the world's free software.