7 ms·

Short summary: there was a time when people paid for browsers. Microsoft started bundling IE for free along with the OS. This killed the paid browser market com

Short summary: there was a time when people paid for browsers. Microsoft started bundling IE for free along with the OS. This killed the paid browser market completely (bringing down companies like Netscape) as everyone started using IE since everyone was using windows. Once their position was established, Microsoft stopped developing IE. The IE team was mostly disbanded and there was no updated in IE for many many years. Not progressing the internet was in MS' best interest. They wanted a world where desktop apps running in their OS was the future.

Iftheshoefits 12y ago
It was a particularly shortsighted gambit, too, since native applications still beat the pants off of any JS web-based implementation for all but the most trivial of applications. Even very popular web apps these days are less efficient than the (native) applications and servers that back them, where the majority of real work by the computer is done, and arguably are less efficient and more clunky (to both use and maintain) than corresponding native front-ends would be. Until/unless browsers actually have capabilities that rival VMs in some sense and are used as such, it will remain that way.
- ZeroGravitas 12y ago
  It wasn't short sighted. It very effectively hobbled a competing ecosystem. They did hold the web back by 6 or 7 years and if they hadn't done their best to kill it in its crib then web apps would be 6 or 7 years better than they are now. (Look at the progress since Mozilla broke their stranglehold, it led directly to the iPhone amongst other things) Its very hard for people to contemplate hypotheticals though (Taleb discusses this in Fooled by Randomness) so they got way with it.
pyre 12y ago
> bringing down companies like Netscape To be fair, Netscape Navigator could be a real POS, and IE 5/6 were actually leaps forward at the time. The real problem was Microsoft killing off all competition and then, having won the Browser Wars, disbanding the IE development team, leaving IE to stagnate. Other issues: - Killing off competition made it so that the browser landscape on other platforms was barren. - MS having a separate version of IE for Mac that was a completely separate codebase with it's own set of bugs/quirks also didn't help with the browser as an OS agnostic platform. - IE's lack of standards compliance paired with it's "still work even with HTML horribly broken" also had a hand in things. E.g. for years a good portion of the Internet was delivered as broken HTML because it "worked in IE" and other browsers were "broken" because they were more strict about the standards.
- yuhong 12y ago
  Yea, I remember it also affecting Opera.
- icantthinkofone 12y ago
  Netscape was NOT a POS except in the eyes of those trying to get web sites to work in it that worked in IE. Microsoft created IE with various APIs that only worked in IE but would fail in Netscape.
  - skrebbel 12y ago
    I strongly doubt you ever tried to make a site work in Netscape 3. If you'd nest layers (yes, the <layer> tag) more than 2 levels, random stuff would break. You talk about APIs but really, if JS compat was your only problem you were a happy developer. It was the markup engine itself that was crap. IE's was simply also crap, just in a different way.
    - icantthinkofone 12y ago
      In 1998 or so, Scottrade, my broker, advised me to quit using IE and only use Netscape because of all horrible issues they had making their code work with it and that they advised all their clients to do the same. That's almost a quote.
  - x0x0 12y ago
    What on earth are you talking about. I worked at a company that built a web app. We recorded 50+ separate crashers for various version of netscape 3-4. There was a running internal contest about the shortest html that could crash netscape. And the funniest. And the most interesting. It was utter shit software.
    - yuhong 12y ago
      I think OP might have only remembered Gecko based Netscape. As a side note, I wonder how many of the crashes would be considered exploitable nowadays.
barrkel 12y ago
IE5 was significantly better than Navigator, and in particular crashed way, way less often.
adventured 12y ago
Microsoft had no problem with progressing the Internet. They made billions in investments from 1996 to 2002 trying to do just that. They were a big spur in pushing broadband forward at that time, putting large sums of money into numerous access providers; Gates & Co. did a lot of speeches and articles touting how important broadband was. This was at a time when dial-up was overwhelmingly dominant. What they wanted, was to prevent the Web from eating Windows. That's a very different context than what you're painting, by claiming they were trying to prevent progress on the Internet.
- tacos 12y ago
  Case in point: an ethernet jack on the Xbox in 2001. People thought they were NUTS. They wound up owning online gaming for a decade.

Iftheshoefits 12y ago

It was a particularly shortsighted gambit, too, since native applications still beat the pants off of any JS web-based implementation for all but the most trivial of applications. Even very popular web apps these days are less efficient than the (native) applications and servers that back them, where the majority of real work by the computer is done, and arguably are less efficient and more clunky (to both use and maintain) than corresponding native front-ends would be. Until/unless browsers actually have capabilities that rival VMs in some sense and are used as such, it will remain that way.

ZeroGravitas 12y ago
It wasn't short sighted. It very effectively hobbled a competing ecosystem. They did hold the web back by 6 or 7 years and if they hadn't done their best to kill it in its crib then web apps would be 6 or 7 years better than they are now. (Look at the progress since Mozilla broke their stranglehold, it led directly to the iPhone amongst other things) Its very hard for people to contemplate hypotheticals though (Taleb discusses this in Fooled by Randomness) so they got way with it.

pyre 12y ago

> bringing down companies like Netscape To be fair, Netscape Navigator could be a real POS, and IE 5/6 were actually leaps forward at the time. The real problem was Microsoft killing off all competition and then, having won the Browser Wars, disbanding the IE development team, leaving IE to stagnate. Other issues: - Killing off competition made it so that the browser landscape on other platforms was barren. - MS having a separate version of IE for Mac that was a completely separate codebase with it's own set of bugs/quirks also didn't help with the browser as an OS agnostic platform. - IE's lack of standards compliance paired with it's "still work even with HTML horribly broken" also had a hand in things. E.g. for years a good portion of the Internet was delivered as broken HTML because it "worked in IE" and other browsers were "broken" because they were more strict about the standards.

yuhong 12y ago
Yea, I remember it also affecting Opera.
icantthinkofone 12y ago
Netscape was NOT a POS except in the eyes of those trying to get web sites to work in it that worked in IE. Microsoft created IE with various APIs that only worked in IE but would fail in Netscape.
- skrebbel 12y ago
  I strongly doubt you ever tried to make a site work in Netscape 3. If you'd nest layers (yes, the <layer> tag) more than 2 levels, random stuff would break. You talk about APIs but really, if JS compat was your only problem you were a happy developer. It was the markup engine itself that was crap. IE's was simply also crap, just in a different way.
  - icantthinkofone 12y ago
    In 1998 or so, Scottrade, my broker, advised me to quit using IE and only use Netscape because of all horrible issues they had making their code work with it and that they advised all their clients to do the same. That's almost a quote.
- x0x0 12y ago
  What on earth are you talking about. I worked at a company that built a web app. We recorded 50+ separate crashers for various version of netscape 3-4. There was a running internal contest about the shortest html that could crash netscape. And the funniest. And the most interesting. It was utter shit software.
  - yuhong 12y ago
    I think OP might have only remembered Gecko based Netscape. As a side note, I wonder how many of the crashes would be considered exploitable nowadays.

barrkel 12y ago

IE5 was significantly better than Navigator, and in particular crashed way, way less often.

adventured 12y ago

Microsoft had no problem with progressing the Internet. They made billions in investments from 1996 to 2002 trying to do just that. They were a big spur in pushing broadband forward at that time, putting large sums of money into numerous access providers; Gates & Co. did a lot of speeches and articles touting how important broadband was. This was at a time when dial-up was overwhelmingly dominant. What they wanted, was to prevent the Web from eating Windows. That's a very different context than what you're painting, by claiming they were trying to prevent progress on the Internet.

tacos 12y ago
Case in point: an ethernet jack on the Xbox in 2001. People thought they were NUTS. They wound up owning online gaming for a decade.