[saurik]

Google has a monopoly on search in the US due to some early advances (letting them kick Yahoo, altavista, and similar early competitors to the corner) that now seems to mostly be maintained by both having sequestered some content by unfair licensing discrimination (such as YouTube in this example) and generally by "we have more of the web cached and indexed than anyone else" (a race they have a many years head start on, and barring some disruptive advance is probably going to be true for a long while).

They are now using the money they make advertising on that search system (if you check their Q10 they don't actually get much money from third party adsense websites: first party inventory dominates) in order to build large numbers of "engh, good enough but not great" services that are impossible to compete against because Google just gives them away for free or even operates them at a loss... it really isn't that different. They are even now starting to "bundle" things together with their search platform (G+) to directly leverage their position to propel other products.

This is especially clear as what really screwed Microsoft was trying to make certain everyone had access to a web browser that could itself be used as an application platform rather than having to pay license fees to a company (Netscape, if this isn't clear) that had such a large web usage marketshare that they were able to run roughshod over the W3 (to the point where their mailing list sometimes described Microsoft as the open hero that will save them; Microsoft even was providing their DTDs for public review, which impressed the crowd).

Netscape used this position to make up features we still hate like presentation-oriented markup, to hold back the original CSS attempts by being unwilling to implement them, and to add tons of proprietary features to their JavaScript engine that they considered a killer feature that others had to bug-for-bug emulate. I mean: I look at the situation and find it surprising that anyone wouldn't think it isn't the exact same story playing out a second (arguably, even a third) time ("you either die a hero or live long enough to become the villian", etc.).

[angersock]

Do you have any links furthering your explanation about Netscape? Typically the story is told much, much differently, and your allegations pique my interest here very much.

[dspillett]

I think most of what he points out about Netscape's browser are down to a mix of frontier development (release now, fix later) and a measure of incompetence, rather than malice.

Netscape did try to use their position as temporary de-facto standard to bully there way through, tough they were not very successful at it.

* Releasing DTDs for review: the were very slow on this compared to MS. Some of that was abusing their position (as the incumbent de-facto standard they had some control, and keeping what they were doing internal for as long as they could forced competitors to either guess (resulting in conflicting behaviours some of which we still fight with today) or wait and implement late). Equally though I think some of it was just their business culture: they were not open by default, they did not want to release for comments until they considered it finished, and so forth. MS had little choice but to be open and play ball with the community: they'd have just been ignored for longer otherwise.

* "Netscape used this position to make up features we still hate like presentation-oriented markup": That is the frontier development thing. "Hey!, Look at this!, Isn't it cool!". Everyone was doing it, you just remember Netscape for it more because the legacy of some of their experiments/toys is still with us day-to-day.

* MS overtaking them on CSS support, particularly positioning, once it became a strong contender for the way to go was more to do with them struggling generally at the time. The application was being killed commercially by the free Internet Explorer which had at least got to the point of being "good enough" beyond being free, they were losing money server-side too due to competition there that they were not able to fight off, and the application itself had become somewhat complex and bug ridden (IIRC the 4.x series was chronically unstable, at least on Windows, until at least 4.0.8) so implementing anything new (and implementing it well) took more effort than they could afford to throw at it. Their alternative (layers) was implemented first and they paid the "jumped first, guessed the market wrong" price heavily: having to support their own idea for backwards compatibility and find time to implement the one that won more general acceptance.

* Most of the problems with JS cause by Netscape are from its beginnings: it was rushed to market. Most of the rest were them trying to keep ahead of the slow standards process - everyone else was doing that too.

> you either die a hero or live long enough to become the villian

Exactly. Well, almost.

Netscape were far from perfect and did (try to) abuse their position a bit, but if my memory is accurate (which it often isn't that far back, so have salt pinches at the ready) most of what they did wrong was due to bad business, process, and design decisions and being unwilling to backtrack on technical decisions that didn't work out so well (for reasons of compatibility: they too kept maintaining/reimplementing their old bugs so as to not alienate people with code relying on them) rather then concentrated deliberate malice.

[saurik]

> Netscape were far from perfect and did (try to) abuse their position a bit, but if my memory is accurate (which it often isn't that far back, so have salt pinches at the ready) most of what they did wrong was due to bad business, process, and design decisions and being unwilling to backtrack on technical decisions that didn't work out so well (for reasons of compatibility: they too kept maintaining/reimplementing their old bugs so as to not alienate people with code relying on them) rather then concentrated deliberate malice.

My personal belief is that the extent to which this is true for Netscape it is also true for Microsoft. (To be clear, I can also make these same kinds of arguments for Google: I state this explicitly as I really am not trying to paint Microsoft as "good" and Google as "bad"; however, I might come off as that while attempting to equate them, due to the preconceived notions that some people may have while reading the below "apologies".)

* They cared extensively about things like backwards compatibility, causing them to not like to change things once they built them; but they cared about being pioneers, so they often implemented things (such as CSS and XSL/T) when they were in their infancy, and got semi-locked in to details that weren't quite right (the box model was not some IE abomination: that's how the CSS box model was originally defined and it shifted underneath them).

* A lot of the things we didn't like about IE6 weren't actually intrinsic to IE6: it was because Microsoft stopped working on IE6 and it stagnated. Some people attribute this to them having "won", but that frankly makes a lot less sense than "they had their ass handed to them with tons of sanctions and other limitations, after a massive multi-year legal--not technical--battle with Netscape, that made working on browsers risky and emotionally challenging".

* They took on Sun and lost with Visual J++, which hobbled them for a while in their push to switch to using high-level language development, and led them to build the massive .NET ecosystem that is much less compatible with anyone else. (The only thing Microsoft did in J++ was add backwards compatibility for COM objects and build a Win32 GUI binding: otherwise, we would likely have ended up in a future where everything else was built on Java.)

This, by the way, I find to be a really interesting parallel; Sun was often on the sidelines, but has actually been a major player in all of these stories: they were already in bed with Netscape when they licensed the term "Java" to be used with "JavaScript", and then that furthered into the "Alliance" after AOL purchased Netscape; they then went on to pull legal challenges on the corruption of Java by first Microsoft (against whom they won, with the audience cheering them on) and now recently Google (against whom they lost, to the audiences' equal delight). The fact that so many people were willing to back Google screwing with Java while being willing to trounce Microsoft for it confuses me to no end: it seems to just come down to emotional bias.

> Do you have any links furthering your explanation about Netscape? Typically the story is told much, much differently, and your allegations pique my interest here very much.

Yes, actually: I have tons. I did a bunch of research for another comment I was going to leave to someone else a few months ago, and then decided "engh, not important, maybe will write an article about it some day"; here is that comment:

<< begin content I was working on a few months ago >>

So, I was also a web developer back in the late 90's: we used to go around to area businesses trying to explain to them what the Internet was (as they would, of course, never have heard of it), and ended up working on the first websites for such companies as our local bank, newspaper, and real-estate agency. I was doing this as early as 1996.

You know what? I have pretty clear memories of Netscape doing exactly these things everyone always gets angry at Microsoft over. Netscape, a company that sold a commercial web browser, was embarking on an embrace-and-extend campaign against HTML itself, and using the resulting influence to get bundled from ISPs as a default part of the Internet experience.

At the time, Internet Explorer existed, but was a joke: no one used it. Instead, sources reported that 70% of the people browsing the Internet were running Netscape Navigator.

> Netscape Navigator 2.0 is a standard on the Web; according to some surveys, it is used by 70 percent of all Web surfers.

-- Web Based Programming Tutorials http://www.webbasedprogramming.com/Special-Edition-Using-Jav...

What this meant is that when Netscape released new features that were specific to their browser, a lot of developers didn't think twice about using them.

> Even though unauthorized, the Netscape extensions have become commonly excepted tags and are used in many Web documents. <CENTER>...</CENTER> The Center tags is one of the most popular Netscape extensions (see the HTML Center Tag below).

-- An Educator's Introduction to HTML http://literacy.kent.edu/Midwest/HTML/netscape.htm

Yes: even CENTER was a Netscape-specific extension. In fact, many of the tags that have long been considered "deprecated" and which many web designers consider cringe-worthy due to being "presentation-only", were added by Netscape and only adopted into the specifications because their usage was already too widespread. Netscape was considered fun to "bash" on the W3C mailing lists.

> Netscape seems to have conveniently ignored certain HTML tags which they don't want to use. They talk all sweet and innocent "Netscape remains committed to supporting HTML 3.0" But we all know that that's bullshit.

-- Dan Delaney http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/1996Mar/0175.ht...

> Netscape is young and horny. Its market, by and large, does not understand what the possibilities are, does not understand what it's being denied by choosing Netscape exclusively, and does not yet care to learn. This is not a sitation where one can reasonably expect technological maturity.

-- Scheckie Irons http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/1996Mar/0185.ht...

> Instead, we get kludgey frames which practically trap the user into a page, <FONT> that we have to put everywhere (as opposed to putting it in one style sheet file), and image maps that are not text-compatible on the same page.

-- Charles Peyton Taylor http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/1996Mar/0197.ht...

Note carefully the mention of style sheets: that is where the W3C was going at the time with their HTML 3.0, and Netscape couldn't wait. If you go back to books published at the time about HTML development, this was a well-known tradeoff: Netscape-specific extensions were designed to have you to embed styling information directly into the HTML.

> Many of Netscape's HTML extensions differ from the proposed HTML 3.0 standard in one big, important way. Netscape has implemented many page formatting options as custom HTML tags; HTML 3.0 proposes to handle formatting via a technique called style sheets.

-- Special Edition Using HTML, 2nd Edition http://www.fishmech.net/netscape/docs/sehtml/15.htm

Microsoft, in comparison, was actually looking pretty good. The developers were on the mailing list, and were even submitting the DTD's that they were using for validation of HTML for public comment before they released new versions. The people on the mailing list at the time really appreciated this, and made their opinions known publicly.

> Excellent! It's really encouraging to see a vendor supplying a DTD for a change.

-- Gerald Oskoboiny http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/1996Mar/0139.ht...

> Excellent! OK: all you folks who told me that H* would freeze over before vendors issued SGML DTDs as documentation, I TOLD YOU SO. And to all the folks that fought the good fight with me, aren't you glad you did?

-- Daniel W. Connolly http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/1996Mar/0144.ht...

One person, in the same e-mail where they were early complaining about some Netscape-specific HTML features, even seemed to (begrudgingly) think that Microsoft might offer some hope in this battle against Netscape to maintain control of Internet standards.

> Might Microsoft come to the rescue in order to eat Netscape's lunch? After checking the Microsoft homepage, I see that they claim to be supporting W3C tables, but even then they are adding new attributes. Still, at least they say they'll support style sheets, and that they've concluded the agreement to add Java.

-- Charles Peyton Taylor http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/1996Mar/0197.ht...

In fact, when we look back at Microsoft's Internet Explorer, the main things we hate are actually not places where they failed to adopt standards or built their own tools: it is when they adopted a standard very early, and then the standard changed out from underneath them. Stylesheets are a great example of this: the "IE box model" was in the standard when MS released.

You then mention ActiveX, but Netscape was pulling the same stunts with Java: their proprietary LiveScript features (which later became JavaScript) were designed to allow seamless back/forth communication with the Java VM (also not an open standard, to note). I remember working on websites at the time, and you'd find import statements in JavaScript code referencing out to Java classes.

When you then found Microsoft building JScript, a language compatible with the base JavaScript specification, that was tightly integrated to an alternative non-open system called ActiveX, it really wasn't surprising, nor was it in any way different from Netscape: both companies now had browsers that had a language compatible with a base (Netscape-defined, btw) specification that had deep integration with an external full programming environment.

Netscape had also added a feature allowing for Netscape-specific plugins which was becoming more and more popular. I remember there being more than a small handful of plugins that people reasonably expected you to have, to do everything from audio to animation.

<< I had not finished past this point, and hadn't finished sourcing the statements regarding LiveScript. I will probably write a longer fully-sourced article at some point soon, now that my time has been freed up from evasi0n's wave being largely over and Android Substrate finally being released. >>

[icebraining]

Microsoft can complain about unfair discrimination when they stop discriminating against GPL licensed apps on their Marketplace.

It's not like users can't access Youtube on Windows Phones either; as far as I know, Google doesn't block its user agent.

[ankitml]

So can google stay un-evil by claiming microsoft is evil too? Abusing market power is not a zero sum game. You can escape by pointing fingers at others.

[icebraining]

No, I don't think any of those actions are evil.

[ankitml]

replace evil by - "closed walled", "money minded", "not caring for users", "bully".