[pushpop]

I don’t think a lack of a browser was an impediment for Plan9 nor Oberon when you look at when they were released. It was more likely the momentum was already behind UNIX and similar platforms. Enterprises already had solutions to hard problems and weren’t willing to take a gamble on something new.

As for the desktop market, BeOS has a browser and that still failed. SkyOS had a browser and failed. AFAIK Haiku has had a Firefox port for several years as well (albeit I make no statement about how stable nor bug-free it might be).

When you have Microsoft and Apple heavily promoting their platforms, even going so far as to give educational institutions massive discounts knowing they’re indoctrinating future customers, it strikes me that the only way to achieve household success with anything new is with massive corporate backing and a decent chunk of good luck too. So personally I’d define Linux as an anomaly.

I also think you’re not making a fair comparison where you compare lines of code in a “basic” operating system to a fully featured modern browser. But I go into more details on that in another post further down.

[__d]

I agree -- a browser wasn't needed at the time. But without one, they're not practical for use as a desktop/laptop/phone OS today. And I also agree that a browser is not sufficient (as you cited, BeOS/Haiku, etc) but it is necessary.

As a related example, NewtonOS (Apple's MessagePad/eMate OS), did have a couple of HTTP 1.1 / HTML 2.0 browsers. But it wasn't able to support SSL/TLS, nor JavaScript, and as a result using one today is impractical.

The world has moved on since the 90's. Some evolutionary lines had features that were lost.

[AnimalMuppet]

> So personally I’d define Linux as an anomaly.

And, given the forces you describe, the ecosystem probably had room for at most one anomaly.