“The loser in the browser wars has filed a private antitrust suit against Microsoft. But the company doesn’t deserve to win. […] It isn’t fair. Netscape gave us a revolutionary product that has touched the lives of everyone in America, and in exchange we took away its market and made the company a minor subsidiary of AOL Time Warner. But we can’t fix things by exchanging the rule of law for a popularity contest. I know that if it were me I’d be mad as hell — but nevertheless this is one fight that Netscape deserves to lose.” First of a two-part series editorial on the legal battle between Netscape and Microsoft. Update: Second part is online: “Microsoft should be punished“.
Netscape Deserves to Lose
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I don’t Belieave AOL deserves any compensation, they bought netscape off the origional owners after it had already lost. Now they want compensation for getting it cheap??? plus netscape 4 was really quite bad, and netscape 6 is just as bloated as IE, just not concealed aswell
The best thing to do is just stop using MSIE and start using a more superior browser such as opera or gecko based browsers.
Netscape lost because it went to sleep after making its 4.0 browser, plain and simple. I was a faithful user of Netscape until IE5 came out, which was far and away a better browser, IMHO. And Netscape 6 was just crap. Mozilla is ok, but I don’t think it’s as good as IE. I know a lot of people will disagree with me .. everybody’s entitled to their own opinion, but I say Netscape sucks
“In the case of the market for browser software, the network effects stem not from the users but rather from the Web designers, who prefer to write code for a single platform. This is why most people think that over time one browser would have predominated even without the market mischief.”
Yeah this probably part of the reason that DOT.com sites are dropping like flies. Let’s take customer service into perspective, if I go into a store and get a cold shoulder and (the lack there of) no customer service, it tells me that they don’t want my business… this comes true if a web designer for a company is too lazy to build a website to be browser agnostic, and builds it to be browser specific, then he (or she) is telling that they do not want my business. If I go to such a site and can’t render it properly, 9 times out of 10 I don’t come back, and most users that don’t know any better probably don’t realize that the site was built browser specific and probably would follow my lead as well!
“For ordinary users reliability takes a back seat to two features that neither Apple nor Sun can match Windows on: the availability of software and, most especially, the price. You just can’t buy a system from either company for $1,000 — but you can buy a really decent PC.”
This guy obviously didn’t do his homework?!
“Many observers call that predatory pricing, a highly illegal tactic whereby a company sells its product below cost in order to drive its competitors out of business so it can then jack up prices even higher.”
Can you say “WAL-MART”?!
“Many critics go further, alleging that Windows programmers deliberately inserted code to sabotage Netscape’s performance, but most such rumors seem to peter out into the friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend of urban legend.”
If that were true then MS programmers must really suck, because Netscape/Mozilla is still faster (except at startup:-)!
“It isn’t fair. Netscape gave us a revolutionary product that has touched the lives of everyone in America, and in exchange we took away its market and made the company a minor subsidiary of AOL Time Warner. But we can’t fix things by exchanging the rule of law for a popularity contest. I know that if it were me I’d be mad as hell — but nevertheless this is one fight that Netscape deserves to lose.”
Yeah thanks to AOL and its old fling with Microsoft… Helk yeah Netscape deserves to lose when AOL was bundling their own software with IE (instead of Netscape) and not improving the Netscape product! AOL has no right to wine and complain, they got themselves in this mess because of their own flirting, and where did that leave them. If I was Microsoft, I would have taken advantage of them as well!!!
I still think Microsoft is a monopoly and is anti-competitive in the same regards!
As Jamie Zawinski (a former employee of Netscape) has written, Netscape lost the war when Microsoft decided to release IE for free – forcing Netscape to likewise release their flagship product for free. At that point, Netscape could no longer compete. And, I think history has shown that browsers are such an integrable part of personal computers that they should come with the OS for free, so I do not blame MS for this.
That is all besides the point, however. Microsoft used illegal tactics to destroy Netscape, but resurrecting Netscape is not the goal of that antitrust case. The real issue for consumers is to make sure Microsoft is punished enough so that they DARE not do this to the next company that comes up with an innovative product (like they tried to do with Sun and Java, and like they DID do to Be :-(). I can NOT believe that there are people who think Microsoft should be let off simply because “Netscape would have probably lost anyway”. Unbelievable. That is like someone shooting an elderly person and being let off because the person “probably would have died soon anyway.” It is the act of shooting that is being punished, not the fact that the person is dead.
I’d read that this is more about AOL vs. Microsoft than Netscape vs. MIcrosoft
Nescape contributes a lot to the mozilla project, and although Nescape 6.0 sucks, mozilla is actually growing into a good browser.
I don’t know if MS did anything to sabatoge Netscape as was claimed, but, one interesting thing I do know. On Win98, make sure you don’t have an Internet Explorer icon on your desktop. Install Netscape 4.x. When the install finishes, there will be an IE icon on the desktop. I somehow doubt that the Netscape installer puts it there. So I’d say Windows does at least pay a little attention to Netscape.
the point is that, had it not been for netscape, we would all be using aol or msn etc etc. m$ as usual, imitates and then kills the competion…..
all AOL has to do is use mozilla as the default browser and IE won’t have the monopoly. No need for courts. Fortunately they are finally going to do just that
As usual, didn’t Netscape touch people outside of America!
If you goto Help –> About Internet Explorer, you’ll see that IE is based on Mosiac!!!
It must have been someting special to have been netscape, but now – it’s just AOL…which is pants anyway, they are worse than microsoft!!!.
I too used to love it, and loathe IE, but if you don’t innovate, or produce somthing better how can you keep up with Microsoft?
Netscape did get it right, by producing software that worked better than anything Ms could produce(this is the , but then if you blink you’re bound to lose. The trick is to create a market, create a customer.
Here’s one example of how annoying Netscape was,
>>As usual, didn’t Netscape touch people outside of America!<<
Though I am American myself, I can admit that alot of Americans tend to forget that there is a whole another world out there beyond the American shores, luckily for me living all over the world, I have a more cultured attitude 🙂
I interact more with Netscape than IE because of Solaris, Linux and Mac OS ( I actually use OmniWeb more than Netscape nowadays). But at the moment I can admit while I’m kid sitting for a colleague and friend while he and his girlfriend live it up over at the Canary Islands, I am currently using his XP machine (with IE 6 and it seems to work fine), which has an AMD Athlon 800 MHz CPU and works really well I might add. I can admit that WinXP isn’t too shabby (yes Eugenia, I can’t believe I am saying that either:-) compared to the old days of Windows. If I was still a PC user, I may never have converted to the Mac… but then again I still don’t the excitement (user experience) out of XP that I get with Mac OS X… it seems like something is missing still and I quite haven’t figured out what just yet… maybe I am just spoiled by the likes of a Mac and it would be too hard to convert back to the PC.
I am very excited about OBOS and it seems that a new life has been breathed back into the BeOS community, now if they can keep the momentum going, then all will be worth it in the end. Oh by the way, has anyone tested Mozilla 0.9.9 on BeOS yet? I did notice from my last test session with the last release, that BeZilla is rocking quite well 🙂
Netscape Deserves to Lose and Microsoft Must be Punished Severely.
Those are not opposing views, they are complimentary views of the reality. The opposing view might be that Netscape is entitled to some kind of relief, wich I don’t agree with.
From my point of view Microsoft is a virus for the computing industry that should simply dissapear in time with everyone’s help. This is not time to play devil advocate nor to be cinical, it’s a time to choose side of the line. I won’t visit Salon.com, I already know long ago what’s their game.
(Ad hominem attack on Eugenia removed by administrator.)
You know, I shouldn’t respond to an obvious troll but I just couldn’t help myself.
The funny thing about your post is that you accuse ELQ of being unprofessional, yet the text of your accusation is one of the most unprofessional ad hominem attacks I’ve ever read.
Most of your post is filled with utterly irrelevent jibes at ELQ’s hygiene. What’s the point?
Just my $0.02.
As much as I hate to suggest this, maybe it is time for these boards to require registration for posters. Might help keep some of the bottom dwellers from surfacing.
Back to the original topic… I think AOL is on thin ice. They bought Netscape, what, 4 years ago? In that time they have done nothing with their product, not even trying to force it on AOL users. Almost all the coding is open-source, anyway, so it’s not like they were actively trying to compete with IE at all. Only God knows what they were thinking when they bought Netscape in the first place.
I seem to recall reading a piece, just after AOL announced the case, that said;
1. Due to earlier judgement they couldn’t lose
2. AOL Time had a LEGAL duty to shareholders to pursue the case.
That said i’m with Jetexas and the salon piece. Netscape ain’t as good as IE (and i’m an Opera user) and why AOL bought netscape only to persist in using IE for AOL users is beyond me.
(though i think employees of AOL TW are stuck with netscape at work – not sure about this.)
“Many critics go further, alleging that Windows programmers deliberately inserted code to sabotage Netscape’s performance, but most such rumors seem to peter out into the friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend of urban legend.”
>If that were true then MS programmers must really suck, >because Netscape/Mozilla is still faster (except at >startup:-)!
Mozilla faster ? Mileage may vary depending on your pc… 96mb RAM, 266mhz pentium 1 (yes, it existed as a mobile cpu) and let me tell you mozilla is SLOW.
It is also slower than IE5/6 on my desktop: celeron500 500mb ram.
What i would really like to be able to do is to get rid of all the IE core being loaded into RAM. It would free RAM for mozilla and let me use it as my primary browser, which i cant do actually due to speed issues.
About the trolls: sounds like its time for registration :/
From my perspective Netscape has only them self to blame. I knew they were doomed many years before Internet Explorer even became bundled for free.
This was in the early days of people getting online with their home machines. For some people it was so impossible to understand that we would drive to their homes and install and setup all the software. We were desperate for customers in those days and this was a way to insure they were happy with what they got.
We would always install the evaluation copy of the latest version of Netscape as the browser. Eventually Internet Explorer came out and we laughed at how bad it was. We made special floppies that made it easier to install and setup everything so that customers had a better chance of doing this on their own. We always made it clear it was up to them to make sure they registered their copy of Netscape.
At some point Netscape sent us a letter saying we could no longer put their software on the floppies or on the PC’s. They told us we had to buy out own copies in bulk, buying 50 copies of Netscape for a little mom and pop ISP was not economically viable, or have the folks download and install the browser themselves.
We couldn’t believe that Netscape didn’t want us, in some cases their first contact with new customers, to put their software on the computers people used. We started installing Internet Explorer on computers with instructions on how to get and install Netscape.
Microsoft worked with us more and more, even though we were a little ISP, to make sure the product got better and that the process of getting it setup on PC’s worked smoother. Eventually it got good enough that people stopped using it simply to download the latest copy of Netscape.
In our case Netscape fostered ill will with us as an ISP by being inflexible and demanding. At the time ISP’s were key to making the whole thing work so, in my own experience, they caused their own failing.
>>Mozilla faster ? Mileage may vary depending on your pc… 96mb RAM, 266mhz pentium 1 (yes, it existed as a mobile cpu) and let me tell you mozilla is SLOW.
It is also slower than IE5/6 on my desktop: celeron500 500mb ram.<<
Well the machines I am specifying are our worthless Compaq DeskPros with Pentium IIs/IIIs with 128 MB of RAM. We have Netscape 6.2 on some of those and is running better than IE 5 under Windows NT! One thing that is annoying is the startup… it’s slow as helk, and I know it isn’t from Gecko, because there is another web browser based on Mozilla called ‘Chimera’ that fires up quickly, so it must be all the other bloat that slows Moz’ down while initializing?!
Perhaps the troll comments should be kept instead of censored. Doing so would preserve the principle of free speech, spark comment (even the most abusive comments can sometimes have a relevant point buried somewhere in them), and most importantly, make the author look like an absolute fool.
> I don’t Belieave AOL deserves any compensation, they bought
> netscape off the origional owners after it had already lost.
> Now they want compensation for getting it cheap??? plus
> netscape 4 was really quite bad, and netscape 6 is just as
> bloated as IE, just not concealed aswell
Netscape still had a significant share of the browser market in 1998. They certainly had not lost by that stage.
How can Netscape ‘conceal’ its browser when it can’t control the OS like Microsoft? Also remember that Mozilla is not simply a browser, it is a browser suite and development platform.
> The best thing to do is just stop using MSIE and start using
> a more superior browser such as opera or gecko based
> browsers.
I hope you realise that Gecko is part of Mozilla. It is part of the Mozilla development platform.
> Netscape lost because it went to sleep after making its 4.0
> browser, plain and simple.
How could it develop the browser suite when it had no money to pay developers? MS gave IE away for free, forcing Netscape to do likewise. How then could they expected to make money to develop the product? The browser suite was their cash cow, and MS had forced them to slaughter it. MS could fund IE development from its profits from other projects, but Netscape’s revenues from its non-browser products (e.g. iPlanet) were too small to conpete.
> I was a faithful user of Netscape until IE5 came out, which
> was far and away a better browser, IMHO.
You obviously don’t care much for your privacy or security.
This is sort of on topic, but a large part is pure spitball speculation. We already know that AOL owns Netscape and wants to use it as its browser. I also thought I read somewhere that AOL is switching their servers to Linux (or something like that). Anyway, I was wondering what you think would happen if AOL embraced linux and made an AOL os, not just an add on for windows?
They could still send free copies out in the mail like they do, but it would contain a very user friendly version of the Linux desktop. They could eat the large development costs of getting the Linux up to speed really quickly because they get a jillion dollars (an industry term…) a month from subscriptions. I think a huge company with a real in-home presence has to get 100% behind linux for linux to really break through in the desktop market. AOL might be that company.
People then could someday go to Comp USA and buy their AOL computer instead of Windows with the Sign Up for AOL Now Icon in the start menu. And maybe they couldn’t really charge for the OS and the software (because they don’t really now), but the constant subscription money and the advertising possibilities in other places in the OS might cover the cost. Of course, since it’s Linux, home users could just download their own distro and use AOL OS software (hopefully?) if it became popular enough.
I’m not saying this is good or desirable for the consumer, I’m just wondering what you guys think. I don’t think Windows will be brought down by a grass roots movement alone (current Linux desktop situation). I personally root for Mac myself, but I don’t see that coming out of its niche market anytime soon (and why should it? the company is doing pretty well).
“Many critics go further, alleging that Windows programmers deliberately inserted code to sabotage Netscape’s performance, but most such rumors seem to peter out into the friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend of urban legend.”
There was a well-known security vulnerability with Win NT4 a few years back whereby an attacker could get remote access to a system by typing the phrase http://news.com.com/2100-1001-239273.html?legacy=cnet“>”Netscape backwards. Of course, MS took some years to fix it, and a few more to admit that it existed.
If MS can do this then it is entirely feasible that they rigged Windows to run Netscape poorly. In fact, Microsoft have been known to do this in the past. Windows 3.1 was deliberately rigged so that it would deliver an error message when run on DR DOS. Digital Research successfully sued MS in court over this. A now-famous internal MS slogan for some years was “Windows is not done until Lotus 123 won’t run!”.
> If you goto Help –> About Internet Explorer, you’ll see
> that IE is based on Mosiac!!!
Both Netscape (up to 4.x) and IE are based on Mosaic, the original mass-market web browser. Marc Andressen was on the development team for Mosaic, when it was stil a research project, and left to form Netscape when Mosaic was commercialised by Spyglass. MS was behind in browser technology, so they made a deal with Spyglass to use its Mosaic technology. The price was that Spyglass would gain a fixed percentage of all IE sales. Of course, IE was given away for free, so Spyglass made nothing…
“Perhaps the troll comments should be kept instead of censored. Doing so would preserve the principle of free speech, spark comment (even the most abusive comments can sometimes have a relevant point buried somewhere in them), and most importantly, make the author look like an absolute fool.”
Not the kind of troll comments that were posted earlier. Believe me, there were no relevant points made there. It doesn’t help matters when trolls can hide behind different names and IPs. There are some seriously pathetic losers out there…
Call AOL what you will (and you’ll probably be right), but at the end of the day it still remains a business. Businesses exist to make money, and sometimes they must make strategic decisions that may not make any sense from the outside.
Once upon-a-time, AOL used Netscape as their browser. Then Microsoft came out with IE. The first two versions were laughable, the third mediocre. The fourth wasn’t bad from a usability point of view, and was equivalent to Netscape.
Then they made a deal: AOL makes their browsers around IE and MS provides an icon to sign up with AOL directly on the default Windows desktop. This did two main things. Firstly, it gave AOL more exposure than any other ISP in the world, and this is probably the main reason why today AOL is the biggest ISP in the world by a huge margin, with one third of all Internet subscribers in the USA plus many more in other countries. Secondly, it gave IE a huge new user base, at the expense of Netscape, which was no longer the default AOL browser.
In 1998, AOL bought Netscape Communications. By this stage Netscape probably had about half the browser market, and falling. What was most valuable about the company was the Netscape.com web site, which by virtue of being the default Netscape homepage, consistently ranked in the top 10 most popular web sites. Web real estate was hot property back then (the ‘bubble days’), and AOL paid a hefty sum for it. By this stage, the Netscape browser suite had been open sourced under the Mozilla Project. There was no profit to be had in developing the browser (which would have to be given away for free in order to compete), particularly since AOL was gaining so much from its deal with MS to use IE. Consequently, scant resources were devoted to Netscape, and much of the burden was placed on the open source community.
In 2001, the AOL-MS deal was due to expire. Both companies were bigger and badder than ever, and each wanted to gain much from a new agreement. AOL had developed a technology which it called ‘Komodo’. This allowed a browser to embed either IE or Mozilla’s Gecko as its rendering engine. AOL hoped to use this as a means to threaten MS and to gain more from the deal. MS didn’t budge, and so the deal wasn’t renewed. Unfortunately for AOL, Gecko hadn’t reached a truly usable state by then, so they were stuck with IE.
Now, in 2002, Mozilla is reaching the 1.0 stage. The time is right for AOL to switch to Gecko. This simultaneously reduces dependency on a dangerous rival and weakens it as well. Be prepared for Browser Wars, Round II.
Thanks for summing that up short and sweet!
This is good stuff 🙂
After a rant against Netscape, I was shocked to read this:
<blockquote type=”cite”>
The best thing to do is just stop using MSIE
and start using a more superior browser such
as opera or gecko based browsers.
</blockquote>
…that would include Netscape, dude.
<blockquote type=”cite”>
bought netscape off the origional owners after
it had already lost. Now they want compensation
for getting it cheap??
</blockquote>
$4-5 billion doesn’t seem cheap to me, esp. for a company that stopped turning a profit.
Microsoft used illegal tactics to kill Netscape well before AOL bought Netscape.
Moreover, Netscape was more than a browser, it was a web server like MS IIS is today, it was a directory service like MS AD is today.
Who knows what else Netscape could have acheived if MS did not illegally kill them?
ciao
yc
Moreover, Netscape was more than a browser, it was a web server like MS IIS is today, it was a directory service like MS AD is today.
That’s right, Netscape was leveraging it’s browser share in order to get shares in markets for email clients, calendaring, WYSIWYG HTML editors, and the server markets (web server, directory service, etc). Even today Netscape ships with an editor, email client, WinAmp, Real Player, AOL IM, QuickTime, Sun’s JavaVM, and a few other things.
One thing that doesn’t get pointed out very often (even in this Salon piece) is that Netscape had a very minimal drop in the number of people using their browser. This is the only reason that the bundling of IE is an important point, because the number of people using a browser rose dramatically, with a huge majority of new users using the IE browser. Therefore it’s not even that Netscape went from 80+% of the market to 15+/-% of the market in a matter of 2 or so years by losing customers to IE. The market increased 5+ times in size with the majority of new people coming into the market using IE (and AOL using IE helped a great deal).
Personally, I’m among the people that switched from Netscape to IE 5. IE3 and 4 had been installed on my system either because of preinstall with Windows or because I needed them in order to install Office or Visual Studio, but my only use for those browsers was to download Netscape. By the time IE5 was released I was fairly sick of the bugs in Netscape that had been there for a couple of years (cache bugs that basically crashed the browser every 10-15 minutes), the amount of bloat that they had put into the 4.x line after using Netscape 2.x and 3.x for so long (basically the whole Communicator thing sucked), the way Netscape would launch it’s own email software when I clicked on a mailto link even though I had never configured Netscape mail, and having to remove AIM from my system every time I installed an update to Netscape. IE5 was a better browser, was faster in almost every way, and didn’t screw around with my system (except for that little default browser setting in the registry), so I killed Netscape after using IE5 for a couple of months.
The problem stems from illegal MSFT contracts that prevented OEMs from installing Netscape servers and browser on OEM Windows machines.
That kind of leveraging is illegal!
MSFT was in a position to abuse their monopoly power and they did. They must Be punished.
ciao
yc
i think the most important issue is did MS abuse their monopoly to propel IE beyond netscape? In doing so did they somehow cause harm to Netscape.
MS bundled IE with their OS not to give customers new functions but rather to limit the success of netscape. They did so because it was thought that netscape could evolve into a lot more than just a browser, like an OS for instance or others.
They used an illegally maintained monopoly to hurt what wasn’t even a competitor yet. That is about as text book perfect an example of monopoly abuse as they come.
Would netscape have failed? Did they make poor business decisions? Not the issue. the issue is did MS abuse their monopoly and we have an answer to that. So maybe netscape deserved to fail but MS didn’t have the right to contribute by abusing their monopoly.
I just have add that if Aol/netscape fails to sue MS and win then what penalty has MS paid.
If MS wins the lawsuit over netscape then MS gets away with abusing their monopoly. So the logic that netscape/aol deserves to lose this lawsuit is saying that MS deserves to get away with all of their abuses.
They did so because it was thought that netscape could evolve into a lot more than just a browser, like an OS for instance or others.
It wasn’t just thought that Netscape could do it, it was what Netscape and Sun said they were going to do. The idea was that if you had Netscape servers and the Netscape browser, you could do everything that way, especially with Java and Javascript. So, basically, you could have a thin client load the bare minimum support needed for Netscape Communicator to run, and that’d be all you needed for an OS. The press releases and such are out there, you just have to dig back to 96-98 in the news archives (which can be a pain in the ass sometimes).
If MS wins the lawsuit over netscape then MS gets away with abusing their monopoly. So the logic that netscape/aol deserves to lose this lawsuit is saying that MS deserves to get away with all of their abuses.
MS only gets away with abusing their monopoly if you feel that whatever settlement they come to in the antitrust suit isn’t enough. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the private suits are settled as well, because MS doesn’t have much of a track record at keeping multiple lawsuits going at the same time (plus they settle almost every suit they’re in, anyway). I fail to see how AOL deserves ‘treble damages’ for buying a company that was in the hole, though.
It is incredible that people are more and more, thanks to the media, calling the US America. Dude, US of A is just a name. I know people that their first names are actually America, but that does not make them a continent either. Has anyone tried to realize how could America be part of North America? For people from the rest of America this is not only very insulting to say the least, but shows how people in the US know so little about the rest of the world, in particular America, the continent. This is as dumb as calling Cristobal Colon, Christopher Columbus. As if the guy spoke English?! It is more ironic that he did not stop in the US in his first voyage, but in the caribean. Those if there is a place in America that is truly America is on the major antilles area. I hope that people not only get more informed about OSes, but around their world.
Mozilla is faster at rendering a page than any other browser. It’s close to twice as fast. Much faster than icab too.
Of course, if you’re on a modem, you probably won’t notice the difference. Rendering speed isn’t the bottleneck.
It is incredible that people are more and more, thanks to the media, calling the US America. Dude, US of A is just a name.
It’s the United States of America. For most people in the USA it’s USA, US, or America, and at least some (if not most) realize that America also can mean a much larger area than just this particular country. It doesn’t have much of anything to do with the media, either, as we grow up taking American History in grade/high school, with the entire focus of the courses being on the history of the USA, not on the greater American continents.
I know people that their first names are actually America, but that does not make them a continent either. Has anyone tried to realize how could America be part of North America?
It’s not really hard for anyone here to fathom, why is it so hard for you to accept that there’s a group of people that feel they have a right to call themselves Americans because they live in a country called the United States of America and they do it in pride of their country rather than the hemisphere they live in? What should they call themselves, USAns, United Statians?
For people from the rest of America this is not only very insulting to say the least, but shows how people in the US know so little about the rest of the world, in particular America, the continent.
Not only do people here in the US rarely know a great deal about the rest of the world, but they don’t care, either. You know what’s worse, though, most of them don’t have to know or care. Perhaps you should be insulted, but that’s not going to make them know or care, either.
This is as dumb as calling Cristobal Colon, Christopher Columbus. As if the guy spoke English?! It is more ironic that he did not stop in the US in his first voyage, but in the caribean. Those if there is a place in America that is truly America is on the major antilles area. I hope that people not only get more informed about OSes, but around their world.
It’s even better that they thought they called it the East Indies and people still call the native American peoples Indians. How’s that for ignorance? Of course now we’ve got the whole PC (politically correct, not personal computer) wave to ride, so they’re supposed to be Native Americans. So a large number of nations spread over 2 continents gets lumped into one group because no one cares enough to be specific, just like we go ahead and call anything south of where I’m sitting right now Latin America and the people themselves Latin Americans or Latino. Then again, maybe the African Americans should be more offended, since a large number of them are of Carribean descent.
America is just another name, regardless of what the person saying it is referring to. It’s as arbitrary as the drawing of a line on a map that made Brazil (or Brasil) the only Portugeuse-speaking nation in America, or the blatant ignorance of people from Europe referring to people from the US as Yankees, with no regard for the area that those people live and/or grew up in.
Hey, Anonymous foreign coward,
GET A LIFE!
Maybe you can find something else to gripe about except what those of us who live in the middle of the North American continent call ourselves. How trivial and petty can you get? Of course, it is fashionable in certain parts of the world to bash the USA for fun.
Insulting? Right. We know so little about the rest of the world? Just how much do really know about us? Not much, I think.
I can’t tell if your motivation is jealousy or snobbery, but it must be one of them. I notice that you did not identify your location. Why not?
“GET A LIFE! Maybe you can find something else to gripe about except what those of us who live in the middle of the North American continent call ourselves. How trivial and petty can you get? Of course, it is fashionable in certain parts of the world to bash the USA for fun. ”
Hehe right on ! I’m Canadian, so I’m an american in the “continental” point of view. But am I insulted because peoples in USA are called American ? I DON’T CARE ! It’s a name and mean nothing more than an easy way to name “USians”.
But it’s not suprising. I think US and Microsoft are the same. They are currently the number one, not the best in every fields, and certainly not always by using fair methods, but they are the number ONE. And like in anything, there’s always few morons that NEED to bash the #1, by jaleousy (sp?) or thinking they are cool doing it.
Oh my god… I’m soooo insulted as a canadian that USians call themself american, I can’t even sleep, my existence is a pure nightmare …
” why AOL bought netscape only to persist in using IE for AOL users is beyond me.”
they didn’t persist, aol was under contract, one that lead to it being the largest isp in the world(behind msn which has about 1/3 that of aol)
with 1.0 of mozilla coming, aol can use that as the default browser and asap moszilla has +30 million, yes million with an M users:)….that would be a nice kick in the pants to ms.. it wouldn’t surpass msie by a long shot, but it would be a huge userbase increase(obviously) and a huge open source win.
Quote from http://uk.news.yahoo.com/020315/152/cu1hj.html
“America Online said Thursday that it has begun testing technology developed by Netscape Communications within its software, fuelling speculation that it may replace Microsoft’s Internet Explorer as its default Web browser.
In an email to software testers, AOL said it is trying out Netscape’s rendering engine, dubbed “Gecko,” on its latest software, AOL 7.0. Gecko technology allows Web pages to be displayed, serving as a foundation for Web browsers. AOL and Netscape are both divisions of AOL Time Warner. “
34 Million AOL users isnt it? Although its about time…
BTW – one good use for Netscape 4 that no-ones mentioned.. a friend runs Win95 on a 486/100Mhz with 16Mb RAM and a 500Mb hard drive. MSIE5 just laughs at that – it wont even install in the minimal disk space available but the standalone browser version of Netscape 4.6 will, and works as well as any browser could on that system.
Has your friend tried opera? It hauled ass on my pentium 150 running 98se. Of course Ie runs fine on my machine too though so who knows.
btw steve you forgot to add eh to the end of your message and aboot somewhere in there ;p
…..theres no backup device and there isnt enough room on the disk to install Opera as well as Netscape!! and uninstalling the browser used to d/load Opera in order to try it is a bit extreme…
I think your friend would be much better off running a real OS like GNU/Linux or BeOS. These OSs handle small hard drives and slow processors far better than Windows can.
my friend is a teaching student.. she needs her PC to make word docs and get email.. as you well know with Linux u get a choice of bloat or no features.. win95 works just fine
BTW I have used a LOT of differnt OS’s .. dont try the old crap about linux being the way to empower old Pcs.. noone wants to compile an OS from the ground up and besides there isnt the disk space to host the compilation stuff on it anyway.
BeOS is better than win95 on similar machines but has no features at all.. she needs a decent wordprocessor.. Abiword for beos is hard to get hold of and buggy…. no spreadsheets .. no java so it rules out her favourite chatrooms… and no support for her favourite DOS game either….
save your proselytising for the fields linux is good for.. and re beos.. get real…. its dead. nice while it lasted but the wake is beginning to drag.
>>BeOS is better than win95 on similar machines but has no features at all.. she needs a decent wordprocessor.. Abiword for beos is hard to get hold of and buggy…. no spreadsheets<<
Well I guess you never heard of Gobe Productive, which is more integrated than MS Office, though not as full featured as Office. It does a really good job of Word and Excel file translations, as long as there isn’t any VB or Macros implemented into the file that is. And BeOS isn’t dead… it still seems to run quite happily as far as I can see, just like Win95 🙂
> BTW I have used a LOT of differnt OS’s .. dont try the old
> crap about linux being the way to empower old Pcs.. noone
> wants to compile an OS from the ground up and besides there
> isnt the disk space to host the compilation stuff on it
> anyway.
It sounds like you haven’t tried GNU/Linux since about 1992. I have a 486DX2/66 with a 540MB hard drive running GNU/Linux with IceWM. It’s no speed daemon, but it’s faster than Win95 on the same machine. I can do far more on it than I could with Windows and I still have quite a bit of hard drive space left.
It’s not “old crap”. It’s fully possible and very easy to do (I did it a few years ago with almost no GNU/Linux experience). Distros like Peanut Linux make this very easy, and you can even use Red Hat (since it’s compiled for i386 machines).
> save your proselytising for the fields linux is good for..
> and re beos.. get real…. its dead. nice while it lasted
> but the wake is beginning to drag.
What, and Win95 is still alive? Microsoft stopped supporting Win95 a year or two ago.
Why are you so abusive, anyway? I was only trying to help. This sort of behaviour seems so typical of Windows users. Here’s some food-for-thought from the http://freeciv.org/windows/“>Freeciv :
“Before you complain to us about how this stupid game won’t just install and run the way you’re used to, please bear in mind that we have been seeing a strong correlation between use of abusive or indecent language in complaints, and use of the MS Windows platform.”
first of all don’t lump all windows users together you’ve got to understand there a billion of us not a hundred thousand or however many people use only linux. as for running a real os, whats your definition of a real os one that requiries recompiling damn near everything just to run it? cause I’m sorry I’ve tried linux and I’ve just given up, after 8 distros, and half a dozen of them screwing up my partition table so bad (either on install or uninstall) that I’ve had to reinstall windows. in my opinion a real os is one that doesn’t needs hours of tweaking and recompiling the kernal just to install a driver, its one where you can just double click and let the computer do the work for you (because after all aren’t these things supposed to make our lives easier not the other way around? So why don’t you take your elitest attitude and shove it up your ass (the same place linux’s chances of taking over the majority of market share are unless some distro pulls its head out of its ass and realizes people want ease of use not the ability to leave a comp on for 200 days, cause we’re not all running servers from our desk are we). and btw as for linux running better on old pcs take a look at the main distros they are either more bloated than xp (mandrake) or slower than even 98 (caldera) or both. btw have fun updating a driver for the next week, I’ll be busy enjoying my pc
You fiddle with your PC
We need to use ours
Get the difference? and someone tell that guy up there that as with BeOS.. GOBE for BeOS isnt maintained any more….and spot the carefully concealed UNLESS…