That may be true as far as web developers are concerned, but as far as the average user was concerned they were just as good as one another. The average user didn't go, "oh, netscape 4 has inferior CSS support, I'm switching to IE". Instead they were pushed onto IE by its inclusion in the OS.

The court did not EVER state IE was better than IE, and I, one of the "people here" who you call "unobjective" never states such either. The court said, in a nutshell, that IE was no better than the competition, including but not limited to Netscape, and certainly not "better" to the point that it deserved that sweeping of a market share.

IMHO, your opinion is uninformed.

"IMHO, NS got 'beat' fairly and squarely. They had a bad business model which was to sell browsers."

This is contrary to the judge's ruling. You cannot abstract out Microsoft's anticompetitive practices and make presumptions about how Netscape would have fared in the market.

Since when was simply *selling* a product a bad business model? Creating a product for a profit is bad business? Well, maybe in an environment when a predatory monopolist gives away a competitive product for free to close out competition.

IE4 was never "clearly better than Netscape 4". Their ActiveX system is *still*, to this day, a major security risk. Their DOM may have had more functionality, but it was not a compliant implementation (and still isn't). Their Java had proprietary extensions. Their UI is a mess. Their app was bloated, and overtook the operating system, forcing a load of DLLs at bootup, to make IE appear faster when started.

IE was, in many ways, designed not only to insinuate itself into the user's Operating System, but also to block Netscape's competition. What would have happened if IE remained just a browser, and not an Operating System extension? Would they have "won" the browser wars? We'll never know.

In Judge Jackson's words, Microsoft has done "violence" to the competitive process. How can that be ignored?

> It surprises me how people here are not objective.

Huh? Do you read minds or something? Most of us haven't even posted anything yet.

> Mozilla looks like a winner, but trying to act like Netscape4 is superior to IE4 is ridiculous.

Who said that NS4 is better than IE4? Both have their problems. IE has 2 extra counts against them, activex security problem (which most people don't turn off) and stuck to W98 (not very productive when one is not using IE). This does not make IE4 a worst browser than NS4, but it does not make it a better one either.

> It's clear that Netscape management dropped the ball and that MS programmers developed a superior browser.

True that NS didn't see it coming, but to say that MS dev a superior browser? Nah! I wouldn't go that far. I doubt IE would have become popular had MS not put it on those W95/98 CDs.

> Mozilla changed that, but anyone looking at the original Netscape4 source code released has to admit it was a mess, and there was no way they were going to compete without a total rewrite.

Are you saying that you have seen the IE source code and found that it was better? ( not that I have seen it but I would not say that it was NS's messy code that brought it down)

> Netscape refused to "componentize" their browser so AOL could, for instance, embed it as the rendering engine in the AOL client software. This more than anything gave MS an advantage. If I was CTO of AOL, I would have rejected Netscape too.

Well, I sometimes wonder what difference would that have made. MS still had that all powerful desktop...

> IE4 was clearly better than Netscape4. It supported incremental reflow, had faster Java, had "real" dynamic HTML, not just layers tricks, supported a much better "plugin" technique, had support for more standards (XML, CDF, OSD, ...), etc.

Don't give me that DHTML vs layers thing. Layers could very well have been THE DHTML of today. As for standards... please, don't kid me...

> It's one thing to believe that MS hurt Netscape by giving away the browser to free, but it's totally another to act like Netscape had the best, most superior technology.

I'm not sure who you are refering to.

> As far as I can tell, Netscape failed to rewrite the original rendering engine, so each release of Netscape (2,3,4) was merely more monolithic hacks patched into the same base.

As far as I could tell, NS did not have the intention of rewriting it. As for it being monolithic hacks, I don't see how that caused NS to loose market share, after all MS did the same with IE5...

> IMHO, NS got "beat" fairly and squarely. They had a bad business model which was to sell browsers. On the server side, they got beat by Apache and IIS.

They did not have the perfect business model but it wasn't so much a bad idea to sell browser, Opera is doing ok are they not?

> MS is being persecuted for this, but I think the failure of the company was inevitable given their execution.

Everyone can speculate, since it did not happen otherwise. I "speculate" that the "failure" of NS would have happened had MS not given out their browser for free. But who knows, that did not happen. And I'm glad, cause now we've got Moz. Thanks Microsoft for making Netscape open their source code. Someday MS might even be remembered as the greatest contributer to Moz ;-)

Hey RJC,

Nice bit of M$ revisionist history on your part, but..

>but trying to act like Netscape4 is >superior to IE4 is ridiculous.

Why so? "superiority" is a rather subjective concept. In my experience supporting VERY large installed bases of both, I found NS4 far more stable than IE4. By that measure, I would rank NS4 "superior"

>Netscape refused to "componentize" >their browser so AOL could, for >instance, embed it as the >rendering engine in the AOL client >software.

I believe this is inaccurate. My recollection of the court testimony was that Netscape did offer to make the modifications requested by AOL, but AOL went with IE because they wanted to insure that the AOL icon remained on the Windows desktop.

>"real" dynamic HTML, not just layers every bit as proprietary as anything done by Netscape in the layers space.

> support for more standards (XML, CDF, >OSD, ...), etc.

Your kidding right? Please review commentary by the Web Standards Project on IE 4's level of compliance.

> It's one thing to believe that MS hurt >Netscape by giving away the browser to >free, but it's

This doesn't require a big leap of faith, it's well documented in the court proceedings, much of it based on Microsoft's own internal documents.

> IMHO, NS got "beat" fairly and >squarely.

You're clearly ignoring the facts in the case.

> They had a bad business model which >was to sell browsers.

They were quite profitable until M$ came along, so I'd say it was a good business model at the time.

>On the server side, they got beat by >Apache and IIS.

Enterprise Server always has been and is still vastly superior in most respects to either Apache or IIS. Most folks simply aren't motivated to crunch the numbers and do a proper TCO analysis to arrive at an informed conclusion.

Microsoft wasn´t punished for being succesful, but for using that success to crush its competitors. IE might be the best browser, but that doesn't give Microsoft the right to include it with the OS. (For a fair competition, there would have to be a Netscape operating system (WinMoz?). Now THAT would be interesting.

Let´s remember that Gates didn´t play fair, starting with his stealing of Mac´s ideas for a GUI. Worst of all, its operating system implementation was terrible. And because of the UNDOCUMENTED features (MS-DOS), etc. very few users could use OS/2 or other operating systems because they weren't 100% MS-DOS compatible (ever heard of DR-DOS? you get the idea).

The reason why free (or at least cheap), good operating systems aren´t in our machines is because Microsoft keeps inventing new standards and gives them to big companies, so we can't develop any good, windows-compatible OS because the commercial programs would demand MS-exclusive features (registry, system Tray, etc..)

And i can remember a freeware DOC2HTML that got sued by Microsoft and had to be removed from the web.

Maybe i could disagree with the government... IF AND ONLY IF Microsoft really gave us good products (this program requires VBRUN300.DLL - ugh!)

OK, now that i exposed my end-user point of view, let's celebrate.

:) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :)

WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

Although many mozilla supporters are no doubt among those cheering this ruling, I'm really not sure that MozZine is the place for it... after all, it's not exactly "Mozilla news or advocacy"...

The release of 6.0b1 tomorrow... now *that* will be news :)

Stuart.

For those don't know the Pen Windows reference, here's an old Time magazine news story ('95):

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/archive/1995/950605/950605.cover.html

Search for "Pen Windows" in the document. The relevant paragraph is:

Fueling the debate--and industry gossip mills--are fresh details of Microsoft's hard-nosed business dealings. In a new book called Startup (Houghton Mifflin; $22.95), for example, GO Corp. founder Jerry Kaplan tells how in 1989 his company, hoping to persuade Microsoft to write some software for GO's pen-based computer system, gave Gates and his developers a demonstration of how it worked. Microsoft said it wasn't interested. But two years later, the company unveiled a competing system called Pen Windows that bore an uncanny resemblance to GO's design, even using the same "gestures" to insert and delete characters. Microsoft calls the account "factually inaccurate."

It would be interesting to see MS open the Windows source code. I imagine it would be the only code uglier and more impossible to make use of than the original Netscape 4.x. ;-)