[bantunes]

"Rather nebulous"? What's nebulous about leveraging your position on the market to drown out competitors with a free browser bundled with your operating system?

If Amazon redirected all search results of a product to their own version of it, omitting all others - would that be nebulous as well?

[WalterBright]

The real reason Netscape failed was their browser stunk. I know because I used both of them. Netscape crashed constantly. Explorer crashed too, but not nearly as often.

That's why people switched to Explorer. Netscape ran crying to the government.

That whole shtick about Explorer being uninstallable was ludicrous and irrelevant. Nothing stopped a user from installing another browser and using it. These days, a free browser is included with about every device.

[bantunes]

Non-technical users leave defaults on all the time - do you really think there wasn't a sense in some people IE _was_ the internet? Don't you think MS wanted it that way? The "Connect to the Internet" icon on Windows 98's desktop had the IE icon on it!

And this wasn't "these days" when "a free browser is included with every device", it was 1998.

I think you're being dense on purpose.

[WalterBright]

Microsoft included a number of utilities with its operating system - like a text editor - that operating systems have included since the beginning. There's no magic line that says a browser cannot be included.