7 ms·

What happened between 1998 and 1999 that flipped the percentage so dramatically in favor of IE? Was it all the new people joining the internet for the first tim

What happened between 1998 and 1999 that flipped the percentage so dramatically in favor of IE? Was it all the new people joining the internet for the first time who simply clicked the blue e instead of installing netscape or did people abandon netscape in droves?

franze 14y ago
windows 98 happened
ghshephard 14y ago
Microsoft included it for free with their (at that time monopoly market share) operating system. Entire Divisions of Netscape were terminated when that happened. It may be hard for people to imagine now, but back in 1996/1997, selling browser software was like selling spreadsheet or word processing software. People paid $50+/copy for their browser. It was a threat to Microsoft (potential alternative application platform) - so they eliminated it (Cut off Netscape's Air supply) - by giving the browser away for free with their operating system - and, because everyone (for most reasonable definitions of everyone) was running Microsoft's operating system on their desktop, there was no longer any need to buy it from Netscape. It probably didn't help that, by 1998, the Netscape client had a pretty significant technical debt, was no longer a nimble browser, and, if I recall correctly, had been rebranded as "Netscape Communicator" and had all this crufty email/calendar/editing software slapped onto it. If all you wanted was a browser, Netscape was not necessarily the goto product anymore. Even simple things like rendering large tables could freeze up the browser. And it crashed. A lot. This was before people realized how valuable controlling the search engine/first hop to the Internet would be. Netscape (Mike Homer?) finally realized that, with it's dying breath, the most valuable asset it had wasn't all the Enterprise Software (Directory Servers, Certificate Servers, Enterprise Web Server, Application Servers, Business Servers) - but, Ironically, "www.netscape.com" - sold to AOL for $4Billion (much of the software being split between AOL and Sun in the ill fated iPlanet experiment) - and, on the last day of trading, was worth $10 Billion (mostly due to to a rise in the stock value of AOL - the deal's value was heavily related to the AOL stock price)
- melling 14y ago
  "At that time monopoly market share (operating system)" What do you think Microsoft has now? Microsoft isn't quite as lethal at this time, but in all honesty, they still dominate. It's funny to see people complain about Google's 70% search monopoly and Apple's 20-25% iOS walled garden, but 9/10 of the people in the world buy PC's with Microsoft Windows.
  - ghshephard 14y ago
    Agreed that most people still have a Windows OS in front of them. But the wild card on the upswing now is mobile - which Microsoft has very little strength in. Also, web applications provide real diversity of application experience beyond the Windows OS. For a lot of people, applications like email, twitter, photo-sharing, game playing, social networking etc.. are no longer tied to a particular desktop client operating system. Indeed, Social Networking, where people spend enormous amounts of time, is an example where I would say the Desktop OS is as irrelevant as your BIOS.
  - moreati 14y ago
    At the time the web-browsing market was a subset of the PC/laptop market - that's no longer the case with smartphones and tablets selling so fast.
  - simonh 14y ago
    Whereas the iPad doesn't count because it's just a toy that's only used for 'consumption'. First they ignore you.... The reality is about a quarter of global computer sales are Macs, iPads or Android tablets and all those categories are growing rapidly. If you include smartphones in the equation, as some aggressively pro-mobile (but not necessarily wrong) observers do, Microsoft already has a minority platform share.
- tzs 14y ago
  I think people overestimate the effect of bundling. As you note, in 1997 and earlier browser software was sold like spreadsheet or word processor software. By 1997, IE was clearly the better browser technically. It was far less buggy, and it implemented much more of Netscape's proprietary HTML than Netscape implemented of IE's proprietary HTML. The sales numbers of the retail boxes for both from CompUSA, Egghead, Computer City, and so on reflected this. IE was massively outselling Netscape. Sure, when bundling came alone later, it didn't help Netscape, but I think by that point they were already past the tipping point.
rimantas 14y ago
IE4 and Netscape4 happened. IE4 was the first really useable version of IE, and NN4 was a huge misstep for Netscape with the whole "layers" nonsense. By that time the first use of CSS started to appear in the wild, (fixed backgrounds and hover on links in particular). NN had this asinine CSS-via-JS implementation that sucked so much. In short: IE became better than NN and that hold true till Firefox showed up.
mtgx 14y ago
Microsoft included IE for free in their monopoly OS.
kschua 14y ago
I was one of those who flipped from using Netscape to IE. I was using Netscape since 2.0 days. Comparing Netscape 3.0 to IE 3.0, Netscape won handsdown. It had far more features than IE 3.0 and was fast, responsive and easy to use. Then came Netscape 4.0 and IE 4.0. This was were Netscape failed horribly. Netscape 4.0 Communicator was slow and buggy and crashed often. When Netscape 4.0 Navigator crashed, it brought down the entire suite (Email client, Web Composer) along with it. IE 4.0 on the other hand was really slick, stable and cool. It loaded up faster and rendered the pages faster (bear in mind those were the days of dialup). It didn't matter that IE 4.0 was bundled into the OS. I was using Win 95 and I downloaded and installed IE 4.0 because I loved it. To me, it wasn't the bundling of IE 4.0 into the OS that killed Netscape, it was just that Netscape 4.0 sucked compared to IE 4.0 After IE 4.0, I discovered Opera and have been using it since.

franze 14y ago

windows 98 happened

ghshephard 14y ago

Microsoft included it for free with their (at that time monopoly market share) operating system. Entire Divisions of Netscape were terminated when that happened. It may be hard for people to imagine now, but back in 1996/1997, selling browser software was like selling spreadsheet or word processing software. People paid $50+/copy for their browser. It was a threat to Microsoft (potential alternative application platform) - so they eliminated it (Cut off Netscape's Air supply) - by giving the browser away for free with their operating system - and, because everyone (for most reasonable definitions of everyone) was running Microsoft's operating system on their desktop, there was no longer any need to buy it from Netscape. It probably didn't help that, by 1998, the Netscape client had a pretty significant technical debt, was no longer a nimble browser, and, if I recall correctly, had been rebranded as "Netscape Communicator" and had all this crufty email/calendar/editing software slapped onto it. If all you wanted was a browser, Netscape was not necessarily the goto product anymore. Even simple things like rendering large tables could freeze up the browser. And it crashed. A lot. This was before people realized how valuable controlling the search engine/first hop to the Internet would be. Netscape (Mike Homer?) finally realized that, with it's dying breath, the most valuable asset it had wasn't all the Enterprise Software (Directory Servers, Certificate Servers, Enterprise Web Server, Application Servers, Business Servers) - but, Ironically, "www.netscape.com" - sold to AOL for $4Billion (much of the software being split between AOL and Sun in the ill fated iPlanet experiment) - and, on the last day of trading, was worth $10 Billion (mostly due to to a rise in the stock value of AOL - the deal's value was heavily related to the AOL stock price)

melling 14y ago
"At that time monopoly market share (operating system)" What do you think Microsoft has now? Microsoft isn't quite as lethal at this time, but in all honesty, they still dominate. It's funny to see people complain about Google's 70% search monopoly and Apple's 20-25% iOS walled garden, but 9/10 of the people in the world buy PC's with Microsoft Windows.
- ghshephard 14y ago
  Agreed that most people still have a Windows OS in front of them. But the wild card on the upswing now is mobile - which Microsoft has very little strength in. Also, web applications provide real diversity of application experience beyond the Windows OS. For a lot of people, applications like email, twitter, photo-sharing, game playing, social networking etc.. are no longer tied to a particular desktop client operating system. Indeed, Social Networking, where people spend enormous amounts of time, is an example where I would say the Desktop OS is as irrelevant as your BIOS.
- moreati 14y ago
  At the time the web-browsing market was a subset of the PC/laptop market - that's no longer the case with smartphones and tablets selling so fast.
- simonh 14y ago
  Whereas the iPad doesn't count because it's just a toy that's only used for 'consumption'. First they ignore you.... The reality is about a quarter of global computer sales are Macs, iPads or Android tablets and all those categories are growing rapidly. If you include smartphones in the equation, as some aggressively pro-mobile (but not necessarily wrong) observers do, Microsoft already has a minority platform share.
tzs 14y ago
I think people overestimate the effect of bundling. As you note, in 1997 and earlier browser software was sold like spreadsheet or word processor software. By 1997, IE was clearly the better browser technically. It was far less buggy, and it implemented much more of Netscape's proprietary HTML than Netscape implemented of IE's proprietary HTML. The sales numbers of the retail boxes for both from CompUSA, Egghead, Computer City, and so on reflected this. IE was massively outselling Netscape. Sure, when bundling came alone later, it didn't help Netscape, but I think by that point they were already past the tipping point.

rimantas 14y ago

IE4 and Netscape4 happened. IE4 was the first really useable version of IE, and NN4 was a huge misstep for Netscape with the whole "layers" nonsense. By that time the first use of CSS started to appear in the wild, (fixed backgrounds and hover on links in particular). NN had this asinine CSS-via-JS implementation that sucked so much. In short: IE became better than NN and that hold true till Firefox showed up.

mtgx 14y ago

Microsoft included IE for free in their monopoly OS.

kschua 14y ago

I was one of those who flipped from using Netscape to IE. I was using Netscape since 2.0 days. Comparing Netscape 3.0 to IE 3.0, Netscape won handsdown. It had far more features than IE 3.0 and was fast, responsive and easy to use. Then came Netscape 4.0 and IE 4.0. This was were Netscape failed horribly. Netscape 4.0 Communicator was slow and buggy and crashed often. When Netscape 4.0 Navigator crashed, it brought down the entire suite (Email client, Web Composer) along with it. IE 4.0 on the other hand was really slick, stable and cool. It loaded up faster and rendered the pages faster (bear in mind those were the days of dialup). It didn't matter that IE 4.0 was bundled into the OS. I was using Win 95 and I downloaded and installed IE 4.0 because I loved it. To me, it wasn't the bundling of IE 4.0 into the OS that killed Netscape, it was just that Netscape 4.0 sucked compared to IE 4.0 After IE 4.0, I discovered Opera and have been using it since.