[shaydoc]

It may disgust you, but Microsoft deserves its place at the table, Microsoft were there right at the start competing with Netscape, and that was a good thing healthy competition in browser development. And didn't Microsoft win their battle with Netscape. In turn hasn't that inspired Mozilla to come back fighting with Firefox and didn't that lead to chrome et al, not forgetting opera and safari and others. I rest my case for big softie.

[marshray]

If you take "competing with Netscape" to mean "buying another browser and bundling it with another product they had a monopoly position on", maybe.

Perhaps they didn't "win" the battle fairly, but back when IE market share was in the 90%+ range, I think it was fair to say Netscape had unequivocally lost.

Mozilla/Firefox was a "Hail Mary" plan that only succeeded because a lot of smart people and a lot of money showed up at just the right time. I shudder to think what the web would be like had they failed.

[acuity12]

Microsoft (and any other company) deserve a place when they create a good browser. Simple as that.

[kls]

IE actually did win on the merits back then, IE 3 was a far better browser than Netscape at the time and Netscape was having a tough time competing due to the shape the codebase was in. IE was quicker and lighter, so people started using it. The bundling was certainly a factor, but the fact that IE was the better browser for a time cannot be ignored.

[Shorel]

I think IE3 was featureless and boring.

It was IE4 the one that beat the then bloated Netscape Communicator 4.

[kls]

I may have my version numbers mixed up, it's been a while and I was relying on memory so it very well could have been 4. The point though was there was a point in which IE was clearly out in front of Netscape.