Netscape vs Microsoft. This is real real old news. In the beginning there was the first widely used browser: Mosaic. Then there was Netscape. Soon, everyone wanted to be hooked up to the internet and read webpages via Netscape. That was the boom of the 90s. Only people living under the rock with dumb terminals on Unix prompts were using any other browser such as the text browser Lynx.
Then Microsoft comes up with a browser known as Internet Explorer. Initally IE 1.0 to 3.0 are inferior products compared to Netscape. Starting 4.0, IE becomes a usable product starting to win Netscape's market share. This is classic story of Microsoft-will-beat-you-up-if-you-have-a-good-product.
One reason for popularity of the web is that the browsers are fault tolerant. If I enter an HTML page without closing my tags properly it will still render without error, although it may not look exactly what I want. Forget a semicolon or a parenthesis in programming languages you get a compile error. Forget to check error conditions you get a crash. Forget to clean up your pointers in C++ will make you reboot your machine. HTML is much much easier. HTML is simple and fueled the boom of IT industry and browser warfares with more and more bells and whistles.
Microsoft beats other competitors up by integrating its Windows dominance into the browsers. Unfair tactic maybe. Soon there is ActiveX stuff that drives out any platform compatibility. Then the yellow bar come in to prevent loading APPLET tags which spell the death of Java applets....
Then Netscape 6 is a real disappointment. The pages don't render right. Big fat download. It is a loser product. Then most people jump to IE. Now I don't know anyone still using subsequent version of Netscape. IE is the clear eventual winner in Netscape vs IE.
Enter Firefox. It is quick and innovative with the everybody's favorite tab browsing. It has so many plugin and stuff that takes the original Netscape concept much further out.
The latest round of browser war is IE7 vs Firefox. I've seen IE7. Where the heck are my menu items? I am in disgust with IE7. Yes finally Microsoft added tab browsing that people liked.When I install Yahoo/AT&T DSL at home, it dares to upgrade my IE6 to include tab browsing. The bad news is, it crashes all the time. Now I am a Firefox user.
1 comment:
Right on, IE 7 and its menulessness is counter intutive. Windows XP made me upgrade; and I'd avoid it at all costs. I used to use Opera, but opera simply didn't work for a lot of the websites, and the ads were annoying. I have been using Firefox for a long time.
Google is the only company that *get it* everyone hates banner ads. Unintrusive text ads was the correct way to go. Good Google, and Mozilla you will be the champions of software for the next 20 years.
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