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Charitably, his thought at the time seems to be that those two vendors could create a viable competitor to Internet Explorer. People forget how much IE dominate
by karaterobot 4y ago
Charitably, his thought at the time seems to be that those two vendors could create a viable competitor to Internet Explorer. People forget how much IE dominated the browser market, and how much that hurt the web. Ultimately Google would create its own browser monopoly, but this statement does not seem to refer to that plan unless you read a lot into it.
- shadowgovt 4y agoCreating their own browser was part of the larger picture: unshackling forward development on the web from the whims of a company that saw the browser as a secondary offering behind their operating system and desktop application platforms. There were a lot of cool ideas in the pipeline (particularly from Mozilla) that were dead in the water if IE didn't buy in. The modern state of the web is partially due to the fact that this kind of backroom dealing finally snapped the market out of IE's hands. At the time of these emails, getting Apple on board with supporting modern features instead of them deciding, like Microsoft, that the web wasn't important was key to that strategy. The kind of damage Apple could have done would have been to forge their own path or to combine forces with Microsoft in the decision-making bodies about web tech.