Is Microsoft Poised To Kill All Competing Browsers?
Permit a brief history lesson.
First there was Mosaic. After a couple of years it was renamed Netscape. It was nice. Slow too. But nice. It cost $60 to register. Real money. By the summer of 1995, Netscape owned almost 80% of the browser market. Impressive.
Then Microsoft released Windows 95 which bundled Internet Explorer (IE). It was a crappy browser, glacially slow, and absolutely free (if you ignore the inflated price of Windows 95). All hell broke loose.
By 1998, Microsoft owned 70% of the browser market. Netscape owned only a comparatively paltry 30%, less than half of its 1995 position. Not so good.
Netscape reinvigorated itself (too late, much too late) and announced two things: a) the browser would thereafter be offered as a free download, and b) the browser's source programming code would be released for open source development. The organizational spinoff directing the open source development project would thereafter be called Mozilla. More . . .
First there was Mosaic. After a couple of years it was renamed Netscape. It was nice. Slow too. But nice. It cost $60 to register. Real money. By the summer of 1995, Netscape owned almost 80% of the browser market. Impressive.
Then Microsoft released Windows 95 which bundled Internet Explorer (IE). It was a crappy browser, glacially slow, and absolutely free (if you ignore the inflated price of Windows 95). All hell broke loose.
By 1998, Microsoft owned 70% of the browser market. Netscape owned only a comparatively paltry 30%, less than half of its 1995 position. Not so good.
Netscape reinvigorated itself (too late, much too late) and announced two things: a) the browser would thereafter be offered as a free download, and b) the browser's source programming code would be released for open source development. The organizational spinoff directing the open source development project would thereafter be called Mozilla. More . . .
posted by Howard Carson, Managing Editor @ 11:32 PM
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