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Background
Microsoft suddenly realizes . . . OMG . . . the internet is NOT just a fad, as Bill Gates had famously said.
OMG, web applications on browsers could make non-Windows platforms competitive! OMG!
Microsoft scrambled. Needs a browser. (classic) Mac already has good internet connectivity baked right in, and a couple good browsers (at that time). Microsoft finds company SpyGlass that makes the SpyGlass browser for Windows. Microsoft buys SpyGlass for $100,000 up front, plus royalty percent of sales. Renames the product Internet Explorer. Guess how many copies of IE are ever sold? Zero.
Microsoft then, over coming years, spends $150 million on IE to develop it into a 'great' browser, if you're a Windows only developer. With addictively great features (if you're a Windows developer). To create a Microsoftized "internet" that excludes non-Windows systems from running web applications. Windows developers (the monopoly) will naturally target IE as their favorite browser. Especially since it has such addictively great sugar coated features.
To further cement a Microsoft-only internet, there is IIS and Front Page.
(aside: Front Page has a four page license agreement, among its terms is that if you create a web site using Front Page, you cannot ever disparage Microsoft, Expedia, and a list of other Microsoft properties. Thus if you visit any web site, and it has tags in the html header section indicating it was created by Front Page, then you know just how credible that web site is when it comes to Microsoft.)
It's like a story of evil, upon evil, upon evil.
Fast Forward
IE loses. Standardization wins. At some point FireFox share goes over 50% and suddenly Microsoft is in panic mode again. IE share is declining. Also this new upstart Chrome browser is gaining market share. So in panic mode a 'kinder gentler' IE that is a bit more standards compliant: IE7.
But not good enough, so IE 8, IE 9, etc. Each becoming more standard compliant. But Microsoft find this is hard to do when the very purpose of IE was to break standards compatibility.
Then Edge, which is an admission that IE has failed. A humorous TV ad by Microsoft about how IE sucks and Edge isn't quite so terrible. You should try it.
Recently
Then Microsoft throws in the towel on Edge, and change its guts to Chromium.
Wow.
Rewind 20 years
Edge is based on Chromium. (Microsoft's doing)
Chromium is based on WebKit. (Google's doing)
WebKit is based on . . . (Apple's doing)
Konqueror.
Remember KDE 3? About 2000. (Before the pooch screw of KDE 4?) It had this cool browser called Konqueror.
In about 2000 I remember reading this on the green site.
First comes the Navigator.
Then comes the Explorer.
Then comes the Konqueror.
Wow. How true those words turned out to be!
(Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Tuesday February 11 2020, @05:29PM
Current level by Google Chrome is Dictator.
Frankly, I consider the market model of software evolution by accumulating trivial functions into one big snowball a best recipe for catastrophe.
Respect Authorities. Know your social status. Woke responsibly.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Tuesday February 11 2020, @05:51PM (12 children)
Netscape was the great IE killer. And it's still the best browser ever made.
Get yours today! [seamonkey-project.org] Now with mo' money!
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Tuesday February 11 2020, @05:53PM (1 child)
Netscape was the great IE killer.
Well, I guess I should reverse that. It was wishful thinking. But now, IE is truly dead, and Netscape isn't
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by dry on Wednesday February 12 2020, @06:05AM
The Suite ( a better description of SM), while still alive, is struggling, seems to only have one active developer and while Frank is doing wonderful, developing Mozilla burns out developers.
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Tuesday February 11 2020, @08:36PM (6 children)
The best browser ever made is Opera 9.
I question DannyB's version of history where MS bought spyglass because people wanted "web applications." I know that there were plenty of bad ideas floating around in the old days too, but web applications? When HTML 3 wasn't even hashed out yet?
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Tuesday February 11 2020, @09:52PM (4 children)
The best browser ever made is Opera 9.
Which no longer exists as of 11 years ago, but I'm sure you can find a copy somewhere. Netscape is still being updated, nice and slow.
I have been using the same browser for over 25 years, and it still looks exactly the same, aside from the logo. As you can imagine, the bookmarks menu is very long. By now most of them are dead links, some day I'll check.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by dry on Wednesday February 12 2020, @06:10AM (3 children)
Huh, it now has tabs, when you mouse over a tab, you get a thumbnail of the tab whereas Netscape, you had to open a new Window.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Wednesday February 12 2020, @04:43PM (2 children)
Though they didn't invent it, Netscape had tabbed browsing since 2002, before Firefox and Opera, only by a month or two
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by dry on Thursday February 13 2020, @02:18AM (1 child)
I guess by then I'd moved on to Mozilla (oldest I have is dated Aug 3rd, 2001) and then SeaMonkey by then. Wasn't Netscape a steaming pile of ads by then? Seems it didn't run on my platform either.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday February 13 2020, @03:09AM
"Netscape" is just what I call Seamonkey, since it is the most faithful reproduction of the original.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday February 11 2020, @10:47PM
Primitive web applications were happening. Not the kind of web applications we have today. But there were new browser features. First tables. Then forms. Forms was the big one. Someone realized that you could use them for more than just submitting bits of data to a web site's CGI script. With a sophisticated back end, a business application might be able to be built.
It was the POTENTIAL that frightened Microsoft into reacting. The very idea that Macs, and Unix and Linux (all of which had Netscape) could threaten Microsoft meant they had to do something. So they did. They decided to turn the internet into a Microsoft only internet.
Even by 2007 they were still doing this. I sat in on a training. Employer sent me to Toronto unexpectedly because there were two seats open in some class they had set up in another office. I got exposed to Xaml. Expression Blend. Basically Microsoft's answer to Flash. It was cool tech. But only ran on Windows. Naturally I didn't do anything with it.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday February 11 2020, @10:49PM (2 children)
IE was intended to kill Netscape. In a sense it did. But the source code of Netscape didn't die. For years I wondered when FireFox would finally be ready. I was ready to give up. One day, it finally happened. 1.0.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Tuesday February 11 2020, @11:10PM (1 child)
Yeah, IE won the battle and lost the war [not really, I mean, there is no Netscape operating system to replace Windows].
Firefox was just the stripped down "Netscape" [mozilla] browser knock off [and T-bird, the mail component], supposedly light weight and fast. Didn't really turn out that way. And now it's just a Chrome lookalike, and more bloated than the entire Seamonkey mozilla suite.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Wednesday February 12 2020, @04:46PM
It is good, IMO, to have more than one 'standard compliant' browser.
Especially when one of them isn't from Google.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by dry on Wednesday February 12 2020, @06:33AM
In 1994 IBM released OS/2 Warp, which included the Internet Access Kit (IAK), a stripped down TCPIP stack with enough of a stack to support dial in, only slip at first but PPP followed shortly.
The IAK included a newsreader, a Gopher client, an email client, an old sendmail to handle the mail and most importantly, a web browser called WebExplorer. The neat thing about WebExplorer was it was mostly a big DLL which any program could call and use parts of the browser for all kinds of things from opening files to displaying HTML.
At the time OS/2 was Windows chief competitor,and even worse, it ran Win3.1 programs and DOS programs better then Windows, better file system for speed and able to run each Windows program in its own session so they could actually multi-task and when one crashed, the others kept running. Drag'n'Drop and DDE worked across the sessions so they could communicate.
One of the many moves MS made was running with the idea of a browser that was implemented as a DLL and designed to be a shell replacement, they even took the name. First refresh of Win95 saw them switch to the browser as the shell once they accepted that the future was the web and not MSN.
(Score: 2) by RedIsNotGreen on Friday February 14 2020, @07:27PM
mosaic added img support and suddenly sites have best viewed with mosaic buttons. of course, not 88x31 yet.
then came netscape with frames and js.
then ie with an actual dom you could manipulate.
then firefox and chrome...
i think the next wave is smart user agents which scrape and reshape the content.