4 ms·

Except for education, you had to buy a browser. You could go to a CompUSA and buy a copy of Netscape Navigator. Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer for free wi

• keeda 1y ago
  Sure, and there was a huge antitrust trial about it too, and we all knew how it turned out. The trial surfaced a whole bunch of shady stuff, but that was more related to them abusing their monopoly position (i.e. "throwing their weight around"). Netscape died because: 1) Browsers were destined to be a commodity, given the first browsers (like Mosaic) were effectively free, and even then it was clear that a browser would be as critical a component of a consumer OS as, say, a file explorer or a calculator. 2) Netscape simply was an inferior product compared to IE and other browsers like Opera (which survived despite IE being free and Microsoft's shenanigans, and is a thing to this day.)
  • youngtaff 1y ago
    > Netscape simply was an inferior product compared to IE The book of the battle - Competing for the Future - makes it clear how much of a mess Netscape was in internally Essentially they had alternate code bases for every other version of the browser and we forever porting feature and bugs between the two (and often forgetting and so getting regressions)