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What we *don't* need, is Microsoft to exploit their near monopoly to kill the browser market once again. How can we avoid that?

*yawn*

MS or it's "monopoly" didn't kill the browser market.

Netscape made a crappy web browser. Everybody hated that buggy NS Communicator. Everyone wanted just the browser part and not the emailer nor the newsgroup. In the end, Internet Explorer won because it was better product. End of story.

Everybody hated that buggy NS Communicator.

Agreed. Communicator was very, very slow, and didn't look as "pretty" as IE did at the time. And back then, ActiveX meant cool, rich web pages, it didn't mean spyware. I don't remember spyware becoming a problem until around 2001.

Everyone wanted just the browser part and not the emailer nor the newsgroup.

At the time of the browser wars with Netscape, you couldn't download IE without "Microsoft Internet Mail and News" coming with it. They later renamed it to Outlook Express (though the Outlook Express executable is still called msimn.exe to this day), but it's still an email program and newsreader that comes bundled with every download of IE. I think people did want those functions, they just didn't want them slowing down the browser. Microsoft's design looked lighter, and it felt snappier to use.

However, nowadays IE looks very stale, feels stale, and is a virus and spyware magnet. My preferred browser is Camino, but Firefox, Safari, Konqueror and Opera have all evolved into much better browsers than IE.

IE will always have a significant marketshare just because it comes bundled with windows, but the alternabrowsers are going to continue to chisel at IE's share until it's around 60%, and we will all be better off for it.

Edited 2006-03-19 03:10

In the end, Internet Explorer won because it was better product.

I'm not saing that I'm right but maybe IE won because it was bundled with Windows and people were to lazy to install another browser?

Edited 2006-03-19 03:24

MS or it's "monopoly" didn't kill the browser market.

This is what happened: MS made a better product and improved IE. But when IE's position and market share grew, the development of browser technology for most people paused for a while. That's what I meant with "kill the browser market". They did it for a while.

Now, there were always competitors that were technologically superior to IE, but they were never a threat. I think that the period from 2000~2003 was really standing still because of lack of competition.

The only thin MS was interested in back then was maintaining its position, *not* taking the world forward. So to be more precise, *that* is what I hope won't happen again.

Oh, come on! Not again "the better product won" bullshit.

There are numerous examples that "the better product" has nothing to do with market success.

When Apple came out with the GUI for the masses, it was lightyears ahead of everything MS offered at that time (which MS admitted by making a third-class copy of it called Windows)
Did Betamax win against VHS. Does anybody talk about the "better product" when it comes to Blue-Ray vs. HD DVD?

Your logic also neglects the fact that there were more than just two browsers..

Netscape made a crappy web browser. Everybody hated that buggy NS Communicator. Everyone wanted just the browser part and not the emailer nor the newsgroup. In the end, Internet Explorer won because it was better product. End of story.

Not entirely true; NS Communicator, the idea of it, was good, all your communication needs in one location - what stuffed it up was the constantly instability, lack of conformance to standards and their (they made the first move, remember) of including proprietary NS only extensions to HTML and Javascript (IE countered it, by including extensions that were actually USEFUL to developers).

They did off a stand alone browser as well, Netscape Navigator, and even that was an unstable POS that kept locking up when a Java Applet loaded, or worse, you would have a couple of different windows open, and find that a flash applet had locked up the whole application.

It was Netscape and their general shithouse quality that put the nail in the coffin for Netscape, nothing to do with the idea of communicator.

When IE4 came out, it was BIG leap forward, and IE5 was even bigger - fast loading, compact, very stable when compared to Netscape - and people moved. Couple that with a good SDK and enhancements that allowed intranet services to be easily developed and deployed over the web browser, I wasn't surprised to see Netscape gradually dying the death it has.

As for Firefox - its ok, but I've since uninstalled it; it was ok for a couple of weeks, then when visiting websites recently, the graphics were all corrupted (arstechnica it occured, perfectly rendered on IE) or incorrect graphics shown on another forum I visit (again, IE rendered it perfectly) - have I reported a bug? of course not, the last time I reported a bug, I was abused to buggery by Firefox developers with their ivory tower complex of 'we can do no wrong! we're always right!' chant.

Your bit of revisionist history is historically inacurate, factually lacking and legally uninformed.

IE ended up as the default browser of millions of pc users because that's what Microsoft tied into its operating system, where it already had a monopoly, thereby making it impossible for any other company to compete with IE by selling a browser.

The fact that IE encouraged the use of all kinds of extraneous and proprietary extensions to html development attests to the real reasons why other browsers were displaced. Hell, this remains a problem to this very day.

Please spare us your propaganda. The public simply knows better.

Netscape made a crappy web browser.
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Darn straight. I used to love Netscape and detest IE when IE first came out. Finally around IE 3.0 or 4.0 I noticed that IE started to really improve while with every release of Netscape, it seemed to get worse and worse for me...