[dave4420]

Browsers shouldn’t be a product because any modern operating system that doesn’t come with a web browser is defective.

A browser is an operating system feature.

I mean, you can get alternative file manager programs. Pay for them, even. But most people will never bother.

[jen20]

> A browser is an operating system feature.

Microsoft fought and (largely speaking) lost an entire case about that assertion [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

[dave4420]

Yeah. I think that was the wrong decision. The problem was introducing features between IE and IIS and using that to extend their end user OS monopoly into a server OS monopoly. MS should have been blocked from the server OS market instead (or maybe some some of consent decree, I’m sceptical it would have been appropriately enforced though).

[tensility]

That's more or less also what Google does with Chrome in order to force folks to use it and only it. I know that well because I have Chromium installed for this reason alone.

[nerdix]

Its nothing like what Microsoft did with IE. There are a few features in Chrome which are mostly optional for the vast majority of web apps. And some of those features like WebUSB make things possible in web apps that wouldn't be possible otherwise. So the "problem" is that Chrome is moving too fast.

IE had the opposite problem. Microsoft was moving too slow and was genuinely holding the web back. And obviously, that was intentional because Microsoft's business model at that time was entirely tied to locking users into Windows.

Its never been easier to write cross browser web apps. Some companies choose not to because they don't care enough to test in other browsers. And even then, there are a lot of apps that just happen to work in all the major browsers by chance. It wasn't nearly as easy to build a cross browser app for the IE6 dominated web.

[fooker]

> I think that was the wrong decision.

Could be. But this decision is why we even have other browsers.

[dave4420]

I don’t think so.

The decision came too late to save Netscape. Microsoft then stopped competing, and were slow to react when Firefox emerged.

Meanwhile, Apple were always going to create their own browser — as part of their own OS — eventually. Opera kept on keeping on. Konquerer was never going to live or die depending on what happened on Windows.