[disillusioned]

I know enough about the antitrust situation wherein Microsoft essentially forced IE on everyone in a bid to drive Netscape (successfully) to irrelevance, but I guess I don't really understand _why_?

Can someone with more of a sense of history elucidate me as to what Microsoft's motivation was around this, since IE itself was always free? I guess I need this expanded out to a greater understanding of the context of the _why_ behind the browser wars in general: was it all part of a long game that leads to Microsoft hoping they can drive relevance and revenue from ancillary upsells like Bing/Bing Ads/Bing Cash/whatever? None of that was even on the horizon... so was it part of some bigger recognition that the computer and operating system was going to be essentially a pure vehicle to a browser and thus reduce the dependency and importance of the OS itself? I mean, that's what happened anyway, I'm just asking for what drove them to insanity with IE dominance?

[WeAddValue]

In the late 1990's I worked at a large bank's Online Retail Banking website running Netscape's iPlanet webserver on Unix (AIX). Being ~25 years ago, I'm a little foggy on the technical details but at a high level we started getting complaints from customers running IE having trouble connecting to our website. The reps from Microsoft blamed iPlanet, said it worked fine with Microsoft's IIS webservers, and had almost convinced the bank's senior management to simply replace iPlanet with IIS as it would be the trouble-free webserver for use with the most popular browser, IE.

Nobody on the tech team wanted that so we launched into a major tracing & debugging effort and eventually found that a change in IE caused it to start doing the SSL handshake slightly different if it thought it was connecting to a non-IIS webserver. Netscape provided a patch and we were able to keep iPlanet on our beefy Unix servers instead of migrating to a farm of IIS servers on tiny Windows servers (they weren't all that powerful in the 90'). This was about the time that the DoJ was going after Microsoft for non-competitive practices. I recall that someone on our team sent an email to DoJ telling them of our experience, but I don't think they ever got a reply.

[scarface_74]

People look at Netscape through rose colored glasses. Netscape was a buggy piece of shit at its height. It was so bad that nerd wars happened on comp.sys.*.advocacy groups where people judged the robustness of an operating system based on how well it handled Netscape crashes and memory leaks.

Microsoft was worried that the browser would become the operating system and negate the important of the Windows API.

[JohnFen]

> Netscape was a buggy piece of shit at its height.

Yes, it really was. But to their credit, they finally realized that they couldn't fix it, released the source, and set up Mozilla to run with it instead. And we got Firefox, which became the best browser at the time.

[0xbadcafebee]

> Microsoft was worried that the browser would become the operating system

Thank god that never happened! Can you imagine how huge the browser would get? How limited apps would be? How much control the browser maker would have?

[hnfong]

If not for mobile taking off, it almost happened.

Even today, with all the electron based apps and “full stack” Javascript developers, it’s hard to say Microsoft’s worries didn’t come to pass albeit with a twist …

[JohnFen]

> If not for mobile taking off, it almost happened.

It did happen, to a great degree. Much to our collective detriment, in my opinion.

[ddmf]

Teams app on windows completes the full circle in my opinion.

[code_duck]

It’s not really that the browser would be an OS, precisely, it’s that the browser would become the primary application API, replacing WIN32 for the most part. This could very well have happened, and to some extent, it did play out - except it doesn’t make sense for things like games, server software, local admin tools and so on… and then also, for some reason people like native mobile apps.

[icedchai]

I used to run Netscape on a Sun workstation running Solaris, supposedly the pinnacle of late 90's Unix stability. It would segfault literally every half hour.

[scarface_74]

Of course my poor little Mac running System 7 didn’t stand a chance in all of its non memory protected, cooperative multitasking glory.

[sillywalk]

Did you ever run Internet Explorer on Solaris?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_UNIX

[icedchai]

I did try it once! It was a pig. Possibly the system I was running it on (Ultra 10, 256 megs RAM) was too under powered.

[sillywalk]

Cool.

Useless info:

As an untrained 'intern' I managed to install Solaris on an Ultra 10 that the company I was contracted to help somehow never managed. Later I got to keep it. Ditto a Sun Enterprise 450.

[icedchai]

Neat! I worked at a big Sun shop for a while, one of my first jobs out of college. We had Ultra 5 and 10's on the desktop, E450's and E3500's for servers, various huge fiber channel attached storage arrays, etc. I really loved Sun hardware. Too bad they were absorbed by Oracle.

[baz00]

Same. It'd hose the whole X stack sometimes. That's how I learned about STOP+A.

[philwelch]

> Microsoft was worried that the browser would become the operating system and negate the important of the Windows API.

For context, Netscape themselves also claimed this would happen. Marc Andreesen famously said Netscape would “reduce Windows to a set of poorly debugged device drivers”.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> Marc Andreesen famously said Netscape would “reduce Windows to a set of poorly debugged device drivers”.

Thankfully it didn't quite end up like that... the drivers did eventually get fairly high quality;)

[teleforce]

Never ask any CEO regarding their competitors, it just like asking a fox how to keep your chickens safe for the night.

Michael Dell is most likely regretting his infamous "I’d shut down Apple" quote.

[actionfromafar]

Only the last point was the why.

[scarface_74]

The first point was that Netscape was horrible. If it had been better, people would have gone out of their way to download it.

When the first version of IE for the Mac was released, it was much better than Netscape and was considered the most CSS compliant.

[wjb182]

Microsoft was surprisingly prescient in attempting to move to the walled garden and attempting to control the stack from top to bottom. Although it never panned out, the original vision for IE and MSN was that Microsoft would get a piece of all sales that took place on the platform, be it physical or digital. IE being the standard browser also pushed adoption of things like FrontPage, IIS, and BackOffice, and all of the proprietary vendor lock-in features they carried with them. I'm not sure to what extent Microsoft ever really feared that web browsers threatened their OS monopoly, but viewed it more as a chance to carry their dominance into a new lucrative market.

[echelon]

> Microsoft was surprisingly prescient in attempting to move to the walled garden and attempting to control the stack from top to bottom.

And we stopped them and the world was better for it.

Now it's time to repeat the process for Google and Apple.

Competition is fundamentally important to healthy innovation. Look at how long we've been stuck in smartphone incrementalism - no new players can even enter the market.

Now Google is trying to control the web with WEI, AMP, exclusivity deals, and other anti-competitive garbage.

Nevermind the fact that most people now do their computing on smartphones, that the smartphone stacks are becoming payment stacks, that app stores are taxes on innovation, and that these companies are removing the ability for new companies to build healthy platforms.

It won't be long before they tax going to Starbucks and justify it because phone wallets are a core part of physical commerce.

[RajT88]

> And we stopped them and the world was better for it.

Not completely. IE kept market share for a reallllly long time because of the strategic incompatibilities they put into how they implemented standards. Ensuring that they kept their market share by smaller companies only targeting IE with their web apps.

I still run into apps occasionally that only work in IE!

[KevinMS]

> Can someone with more of a sense of history elucidate me as to what Microsoft's motivation was around this, since IE itself was always free?

MS saw the web browser in general as a potential "platform" and direct competition to their OS monopoly and they wanted control of it by crushing competing browsers. It sounded a little crazy at the time, but years later, here we are with chromebooks and google apps and other examples that run everything in a browser.

[echelon]

We're better for that competition. It led to the rise of Apple, Google, and so many other companies.

The antitrust folks need to do the same to Google Chrome.

[nine_k]

Yes, Google was great for some time, say, first 15 years or so.

By now it's pretty ironic given the position of Chrome on the market.

[javcasas]

IE successfully killed Netscape, then proceeded to do nothing for 10 years, not improving, not fixong bugs and vulnerabilities, showing that the only effective way of constructing applications would be desktop applications. I mean, windows-only desktop applications. Or maybe ActiveX windows-only webpages.

Then Firefox came from the ashes of Netscape.

[icedchai]

Netscape 4.x was incredibly unstable, literally crashing every half hour. IE was the only usable browser for most of the early 2000's. Microsoft didn't drive Netscape to irrelevance for no reason... they absolutely had a better product. I briefly worked at a company run by former Netscape people, and even they used IE.

[drc500free]

Tech companies want to commoditize their complements. This creates a profit-less dead zone around them to prevent disruption by adjacent technologies.

https://gwern.net/complement

[code_duck]

It’s very simple: at the time, MS controlled the market for consumer and office computing. There was no such thing as Bing and Google was just getting started. Apple was not doing well, and mobile phones as we know them didn’t exist yet. They understood browsers to be a platform that could replace desktop software, potentially making Windows irrelevant, and they wanted to hold back and/or control the web platform.

[gonehome]

I swear I read the Netscape guys went to Microsoft hq in Redmond and posted signs all over the campus mocking Microsoft for being stupid and missing the web.

Rumor was Gates saw one and thought they were right so pivoted to destroy them.

Don’t poke the bear I guess?

I can’t remember where I read this or how true it’s likely to be, but it came to mind.

[actionfromafar]

In my memory it was the other way around?

[gonehome]

Maybe? I did find this from 1997: https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Microsoft-Pulls-Pran...

I thought I’d read that came after Netscape started it though? I could be wrong.

Some more info here: https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/browser-wars/

> “Then, Marc Andreessen began talking up Netscape not just as a browser, but as a new, cross-platform operating system. He went as far as saying that in the future, Netscape would reduce Microsoft to a set of “poorly debugged device drivers.”

> Gates did a quick about face in May of 1995. He sent out a memo to all Microsoft employees titled “The Internet Tidal Wave.” In it, Gates outlined a new future for his company, one connected extricably to the Internet. His paranoia for competition was also clear. Netscape, Gates demanded, was a company that Microsoft would need to “match and beat.””

[disillusioned]

Well that's the nitty gritty of the specific history I was looking for, thanks!

All these comments are great, though.

[makeitdouble]

On the "why", I'd look at it the other way round: there was absolutely no downside for MS for a very long time. Any money they'd "lose" on browser sales were largely compensated on OS sales (even as they also were pushing basically free OS distribution by letting piracy run rampant, also giving them an insane OS share).

With no penalizing cost and no consequences (the DOJ had a first anti-trust probe that led to nothing. If the US did nothing they assumed no one else could stop them), there's just no reason to not shoot for the moon and go for total market domination.

It's only after hitting the EU antitrust case and the later US cases that they changed course and factored the new costs in their strategy.

[Spooky23]

Because BillG missed the boat in the internet, and everyone knew that the web would crush fat client apps on the Microsoft platform. Java had a ton of traction and drained the Windows moat.

Microsoft’s strategy around identity, browser and Outlook was solid. Outlook cemented Office. AD made Windows Server a necessity. The dominance and stasis of Windows and management of Sun/Java litigation held webapps back for several key years.

That delay meant that Microsoft emerged from that era with .Net, SharePoint, Dynamics and the beginnings of what became O365.

[zer0zzz]

Any platform is threatened by any app that becomes bigger and more important than the platform itself. They invested in ie for the same obvious reasons that Apple tightens control over apps on the AppStore. When you spend more time in an app like Netscape then windows is less relevant and you’d be more likely to use some other platform that could still run Netscape.

ChromeOS takes it a step further where the platform is the app you used most on from the PC.

[TradingPlaces]

IMO, 2 things:

1. They had internalized the Innovator’s Dilemma so much that everything was existential.

2. The browser was viewed as middleware that made the operating system irrelevant. They viewed lack of compatibility as an operational moat. To some extent this is/was true.

So, entirely defensive to protect Windows and Office.

[KnobbleMcKnees]

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/cyber/we...

[alphager]

A lot of comments regarding the browser as the platform, but I remember it differently.

I remember it as a push for IIS. Netscape didn't make money with the browser; the business model was giving away the browser to sell the server.

[_ea1k]

Netscape had some fairly crazy, ill-conceived ideas of basically turning the Navigator ecosystem into an OS replacement, at least for the shell.

Netscape itself was terrible, but MS saw danger here, since it would effectively commodotize the underlying OS.

They went after it just hard enough to get antitrust oversight. TBH, they didn't need to go that aggressively. The whole thing looks a little ridiculous in hindsight.

[actionfromafar]

MS was exactly right. The browser has commoditized the OS to a very large degree.

[_ea1k]

Yes, they were definitely directionally correct. I remember being really excited by Netscape Constellation at the time: https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-to-enable-the-free-google-...

[Dwedit]

MSIE = ActiveX controls! ActiveX controls = dependent on Windows.

[linguae]

I remember the era (roughly 1998 to 2004) when IE was completely dominant. It sucked if you used an alternative web browser or a non-Windows operating system, which I believe was the point of Microsoft's behavior: protect and maintain the dominance of Windows and the Microsoft ecosystem in general at all costs. Many websites were written with just Internet Explorer for Windows in mind. If you used a different web browser, the web page often didn't render as intended. Even using Internet Explorer for Macintosh wasn't a workaround. Even worse were sites that used ActiveX controls (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActiveX). While there are ActiveX controls that are not Windows-dependent (ActiveX did run on some non-Windows platforms), in practice many of these controls were Windows-dependent. I remember back in 2005 not being able to use my Linux desktop to fill out an online college financial aid application because the site demanded I use Internet Explorer; I had to use a Windows machine to fill out the application.

Based on what I remember, there were a few factors that eroded Internet Explorer's dominance starting around 2005:

1. Greater awareness of the security problems Windows had during the mid-2000s, especially surrounding Internet Explorer and ActiveX. This encouraged web users to use alternative web browsers, and this encouraged web developers to drop ActiveX for other technologies.

2. The release of Mozilla Firefox in 2004. The browser had an excellent reputation for its speed and its support for the latest web standards (something I'll get to later), and it had tabbed browsing, which Internet Explorer lacked at the time.

3. The Web kept evolving while Internet Explorer's development essentially halted after IE 6 was released. There were new standards that web developers wanted to take advantage of. Firefox took advantage of them, but because IE's development essentially halted, IE 6 didn't take advantage of them. By the time Microsoft finally started work on IE 7 (it was released in 2006), Firefox already received significant mindshare, especially among tech-savvy users.

The latter half of the 2000s and the early years of the 2010s were a golden age for the Web. There was competition in the browser market: Firefox kept advancing, Opera was still popular, IE became competitive again, Safari was a nice browser for the Mac (and even had a Windows port at some point, though I don't know if it was ever popular), and Google released a nice, fast browser named Chrome that started gaining momentum. Web developers generally respected web standards and didn't engage in "Best viewed in X browser" shenanigans like during the Bad Old Days. It was a wonderful time.

Of course, over the 2010s, Chrome became the dominant web browser, Firefox lost momentum, Internet Explorer was replaced by a Chromium fork called Edge, and unfortunately we're starting to see "Best viewed in Chrome" websites and Google having outsized influence over Web standards. There's a new 800 pound gorilla in the jungle.

[kdklol]

>The latter half of the 2000s and the early years of the 2010s were a golden age for the Web.

Yes, and in so many more ways than just how diverse the browser ecosystem was. Seemingly everything computer internet retated was, but maybe thats my nostalgia :)

Anyway, thank you, this was informative.

[yftsui]

Between 2002 to 2007, I recall a huge number of websites put small fonts in the footer says "For best results, view this website at 800 x 600 with Microsoft Internet Explorer 6", it eventually get updated to something like "This website is optimized for IE and a resolution of 1024 x 768"

The text never got updated to IE7, by the time IE8 arrives, everybody seems moved on to Opera, Firefox or Chrome already, so all websites just removed that footer.