Andreessen on the Browser Wars 550
Pauly writes "In this interview, Marc Andreessen dismisses the likelihood of a renewed browser war based on the release of Mozilla 1.0. He cites Microsoft's current monopolistic market share, and dares anyone to try and fight it."
Netscape as AOL backup plan... (Score:4, Interesting)
Andreessen: Yeah, I think so. When they originally did the acquisition, the big motivation around it was to be able to have a bargaining chip
This would have never occurred to me, but it makes so much sense...
AOL hasn't been promoting Netscape the way they could have been, and they certainly seemed to have gone out of their way NOT to switch.
Now I know why...
Re:Netscape as AOL backup plan... (Score:2)
Doesn't this sound realistic? (Score:5, Insightful)
Trust me, I want to see someone make a run at M$ crap, BUT I don't see it happening. Not without an act of God.
RonB
Re:Doesn't this sound realistic? (Score:2, Informative)
Problem is that there is no way to turn off all the bloatware features that have been added to browsers. Like javashit and CSS (OK can't expect Hakon not to do CSS on his browser ...)
As for netscape, only reason I ever use it is because MIT libraries don't support IE for the journals online my wife uses (she being a perpertual (sorry tenured) student there).
Re:Doesn't this sound realistic? (Score:3, Insightful)
Handheld devices are where MS are likely to face the biggest problems. Nokia (especially), Ericsson, Motorola use, and invested in, Symbian [symbian.com] because they do not want MS to turn them into commodity box makers like the PC manufacturers. Maintaining their margins depends on being able to continue differentiating their devices.
Andreesen is right about the importance of form factors, but they are more imprtant for handheld devices than for desktop devices - hence the huge variety of mobile phone and PDA designs but the success of MS, Apple being limited to niche markets, and the failure of internet appliances etc.
IE will face competition from browsers running on devices other than PCs. Mobile devices and (perhaps) games consoles. These are makets dominated by comapnies that have the resources to take on MS, and who know how dangerous MS is.
Although AOL may have bought Netscape as a bargaining chip to help negotiations with MS, they do have an interset keeping competition alive. If everyone designs to IE to the extent that other browser become unusable (not a problem yet), then they could cut off AOL with impunity. The higher IE's market share become the weaker AOL's position becomes.
Re:Doesn't this sound realistic? (Score:4, Informative)
I wrote a browser in 1992.
Marc's was not the first by a long shot, it was the first browser for motif that used the motif look and feel. Before Mosaic there were browsers but they mostly looked awful.
The big innovation in Mosaic was not the images, it was the forms. Images were cute but at the time there wasn't that much bandwidth (The whole of CERN had a T1). It was adding the forms that opened up a whole new area of capability.
Re:Doesn't this sound realistic? (Score:2)
Or AOL changing their minds and switching to shipping a Netscape product as standard. Let's face it, most users don't change from their default browser, and for an awful lot of people, that browser is whatever AOL says it is. Microsoft's massive market share could be reduced to near half the market overnight.
Re:Doesn't this sound realistic? (Score:2, Interesting)
The fact is, i've switched from IE to Moz. I've told all my friends how great it is and encouraged them to at least give it a try.
It takes little baby steps for something to take off, and i'd have to say i'm one of them. Once the word spreads that there's a better alternative out there it's going to start taking off.
The toughest part is going to be getting people to download it. That's the whole problem with IE's integration into the OS. People use what's on their PC.
I think the first step to breaking down that barrier is getting the Mozilla page up to par with MS's (i know, it sounds evil). Get some nice graphics of Moz running, and for goodness sakes, get a nice easy noob download interface going!!!!!
Re:Doesn't this sound realistic? (Score:2)
Or an act of law. There's a patch coming up from MS that removes IE. Probably pressured by their anti-trust case.
Re:Doesn't this sound realistic? (Score:2)
People care about gas mileage? Why do we have SUVs?
Re:Doesn't this sound realistic? (Score:2)
I wouldn't drive one - but you should see my unpaved, 500' uphill driveway in the winter.
Re:Doesn't this sound realistic? (Score:2)
Re:Doesn't this sound realistic? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that most people don't know what a browser is. My secretary sure doesn't. I'm not sure she even knows what the Internet is beyond some vague notions that it's "out there" somewhere, and that she gets to it whenever she double-clicks the shortcuts I set up on her computer.
Trying to convince her to switch browsers would be like trying to convince my wife to use a different brand of antifreeze. Even on the off-chance she knew what it was, there's no chance in hell she'd ever care.
So, it should be easy. (Score:3, Interesting)
That's not a problem, it's the solution. The next computer they get has Red Hat on it with KDE desktio default. As long as they can read their old work, surf, email and isntant message, they will be as happy as they ever were. As Andersen pointed out, the biggest factor is what browser comes with the computer.
The problem comes when you have people who have spent way too much time with Word docs and other little endless mazes M$ makes. Their work will be next to impossible to get out of their current computer, even into the latest and greatest M$ cruft. These people also resent it when all of their little shortcuts and lefthand clicks are replaced and they have to learn something different. These people can be helpful once they've lived through one or two M$ upgrades with all the loss of work. They learn, slowly, but they learn just like the rest of us have. Still, you have to get all thier junk out. Macros, VB, shudder.
People will be much easier to move in the future. Remember that it's only been a few years since PCs took everything over. What is it, 60% of PCs still have Windows 98 on them? What this means is that most people have never suffered a real M$ upgrade. After one of those, you can swap out everthing and make them just as happy as anyone.
Interviewer is a dolt (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Interviewer is a dolt (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Interviewer is a dolt (Score:5, Insightful)
Which means he's pretty out of touch with the technology he helped create and also that people in general (even Mark) equate OSS with "fringe stuff". The fact that the browser is closed source doesn't matter, we'll call it "Open Source" anyway because the same lunatic fringe that supports OSS seems to kind of like it.
Re:Interviewer is a dolt (Score:2)
till you pay for it?
"visionary Marc Andreessen" (Score:3, Informative)
Re:"visionary Marc Andreessen" (Score:3, Informative)
On the other hand, had Mosaic (probably created with mostly public money) been under an open source license, the hordes of open source hackers would have had the same starting point that MS had when they created explorer.
Anyway, I think that's how it happened.
Re:Interviewer is a dolt (Score:3, Informative)
Looks pretty clear to me that the interviewer thinks Opera is open source. Or he can't use pronouns. Can't really tell if Andreesseen thinks so or his comments have been damaged by rewriting.
Browser war, schmowser war (Score:2, Interesting)
"Winning" now isn't about who has the most market share. It's about making enough of a dent in it that "web developers" recognize they need to support web standards and not MS IE standards. The web is for everyone, not IE users on Windows. (And I can say that because IE on Windows and Mac have tons of differences often overlooked by IE Web developers.)
Go Go Mozilla!
Re:Browser war, schmowser war (Score:2)
That's kind of the whole point - if IE continues to make even more ground, perhaps by a certain evil monopoly putting IE specific stuff in it's web tools, then Mozilla and the other may not continue, or they may be less and less useful when you need to do something on the web.
Re:Browser war, schmowser war (Score:2)
Re:Browser war, schmowser war (Score:2)
You never know... (Score:3, Interesting)
Opera open source? I don't think so, IDG... (Score:2)
Seems like a discussion between two people who are a bit out of it...
Re:Opera open source? I don't think so, IDG... (Score:2)
Please note I'm no IE flag waiver, nor am I an Opera defender/accuser, I'm just making an observation here.
Re:Opera open source? I don't think so, IDG... (Score:2)
But if you give Andreesen the benefit of the doubt, you can read Andreesen's response as a rhetorical question. That is, I think he was ignoring the (mistaken) open source aspect of the question, and simply dismissing the interviewer's question as irrelevant because no browser has a share of the market that can touch Microsoft's share. He seemed pretty focused on that point.
Or, yes, maybe he really isn't paying attention to the browser alternatives out there and is no longer in a position to say anything authoritative. That's certainly a valid reading of his remarks. I don't know. I was rather disappointed in the interview's brevity and lack of depth.
The beast needs to be attacked one cell at a time (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, MS does not really have a way of combating Mozilla. How are they going to undermine a free product. As long as we keep fighting the battles we can beat the Beast. It's going to take patience and a few good victories to gain momentum.
It's already happening, Wal-Mart's loading Linux on their dirt-cheap PCs for the masses, Apple's making thier systems ever more Linux frindly, IBM has given Linux their papal blessing. Peru and a few other enlightened Nation-states are considering Linux. ILM and the CG market is shifting to Linux.
Mozilla already boast features that IE does not have: Tab browsing, ad disabling, cleaner javascript, multiple platform support. Let's build on this take the browser even further. By constantly improving the user experience Mozilla can win back users.
Ultimately, Linux and Mozilla will win the mindshare battle one step at a time. Let's continue to build kick ass, peer reviewed software one line at a time, and we will succeed in time. Give this time, in 3-5 years time, more victories will come.
Remember it is darkest before sun rise.
Re:The beast needs to be attacked one cell at a ti (Score:3, Insightful)
:)
Re:The beast needs to be attacked one cell at a ti (Score:3, Insightful)
Uh..Duh? How about undermining it by making their browser also free and also bundling it with the OS 95% of the world is using? How does MOZILLA combat THAT? Note: A download is NOT FREE. It costs time, and in many places of the world bandwidth is not flat-rate, so its not even "free" in that sense.
I won't even bother getting into the discussion of which is a better product from a Windows end-user perspective, since its an opinion. Suffice it to say, Mozilla is not demonstrably a better browser for everyone, even if it might render HTML more correctly according to the standard.
Lastly you seem to forget that Netscape was one the guy with 90%+ of the browser market, and it was, for all intents, free. Yes, they charged business customers but that's fairly insignificant as the vast majority of people (maybe 90% of the original 90%) were using it for free. So obviously Microsoft found away to combat that (see not-so-secret-strategy above).
Re:The beast needs to be attacked one cell at a ti (Score:2)
m$ originally combatted NN with bundling the browser. win 95 came with ie 3.0. at the time, people were willing to install NN because it was better. but when win started being included with IE 4.0 that changed. people saw that it was a fairly good browser, and gave up NN like last week's girlfriend. no phone call, nothing. when ie 5.x was getting started, and NN released their pathetic 6.0 browser it was just to keep a minute amount of people happy (it probably didn't really do that) and to kinda let hte public know they were still alive. again moz will change that. it's a better browser and once users (and corporate environments) see it's features and functionality, i see them flocking. IE's time is limited. when moz is able to replace win's file explorer all around, it will gain more share. it's still too easy to be browsing local files in M$ windows and just decide you want to bring up a web page, and type it in the address bar there. tabbed browsing and no pop-ups are an excellent start, now it's on to level 2...
Re:The beast needs to be attacked one cell at a ti (Score:3, Interesting)
This has been tried, and it failed. You're assuming that the average consumer/user out there actually CARES about technological superiority. They don't. IE is "good enough", and it already comes installed on everything known to man, including damned internet-ready refrigerators. For your AVERAGE consumer something has to be exponentially better before they will eschew it in favor of the bundled item. Netscape fought against this and look what happened to them. I'm not going to debate the legality of what MS did to Netscape because that's not the topic here, but suffice to say that I don't think there's ANYTHING Mozilla could possibly bring to the table that would reverse the current trend, unless they found a way to have it read minds and present holographic interactive representations of supermodels for your pleasure.
"Don't fight with MS on their turf/by their rules" has been tried before, and it just does not work. MS either has their turf too well covered or they change the rules (FUD, vaporware, strongarm) to destroy the competition. With but few exceptions no one has stood up to MS and won (for long). Linux is a relative exception, but only (IMHO) because there is no corporate entity behind Linux that MS can attack. Unfortunately, that very lack is what's keeping Linux from making inroads beyond the server room, at least in the minds of the executives, VP's, and Director's who sign the big checks for software purchases.
Have you actually tried Mozilla? (Score:2, Interesting)
Killing popups *is* exponentially better than IE.
Having actually talked to quite a few "average users" who don't care about technological superiority, when I say "Mozilla kills popups dead" their eyes bug out and they immediately want it.
Re:Have you actually tried Mozilla? (Score:2)
Yep, there's nothing like trying to masturbate to animal porn and getting interrupted by a midget-porn popup to motivate the "average user" to seek out a new browser.
Re:The beast needs to be attacked one cell at a ti (Score:3, Interesting)
While I see where you are coming from, I have to disagree. Look at Quicken, for instance. Microsoft fought that piece of software with MS Money for quite a long time, tooth & nail on several occasions. And on certain fronts, MS Money was as good as Quicken. However, Quicken still maintains almost 80% of the home finance market. Despite MS's attempts at bundling MS Money with MS Works, despite their discounts on it with purchases of MS office. Quicken does one thing, and it does it extremely well, and consumers know that. They really do care if it Quicken or not.
By that same token, I think consumers will really care about their browsers. I honestly think that IE won a lot of the market share because NS4 and especially NS6 were slow & buggy. (Of course, having the browser built inot the OS helps too). MS did have the better product, but they don't anymore. If AOL goes to a Netscape browser, and the consumers find the new features, the tabbed browsing, etc., I think there is a good chance of them not wanting to go back to IE. I was just speaking to a friend of mine who uses AOL earlier tonight, and she, albeit a textbook case of an AOL user, was asking me about other browsers because she had heard about some recent security holes in IE (e.g. Gopher hole).
There is a movement growing out there, and believe it not, AOL could be the best chance we geeks have to get an Open-Source browser back into the market.
Re:The beast needs to be attacked one cell at a ti (Score:2)
Huh? What do you mean? Other people have implemented X on MacOS X and ported Linux apps to MacOS X. But what has Apple itself done with respect to Linux? I use both Linux and MacOS X, and I haven't seen Apple do anything at all to make their system more "Linux friendly." (Considering that Apple's desktop market share is about 5%, whereas Linux's is about 0.5%, it's hard to see why Apple would care about Linux either way.)
Mozilla already boast features that IE does not have: Tab browsing, ad disabling, cleaner javascript, multiple platform support. Let's build on this take the browser even further. By constantly improving the user experience Mozilla can win back users.
Your average IE use doesn't know these features exist. If it became an issue, MS could easily incorporate them into IE.
Wal-Mart's loading Linux on their dirt-cheap PCs for the masses
Uh, they're loading up Lindows for the masses. And I suspect most of the masses are either going to return the machine when they find out it doesn't run their favorite Windows apps, or else reformat the hard disk and install Windows on it.
Re:The beast needs to be attacked one cell at a ti (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh yeah, that's gonna happen. If most of the masses were at that level of knowledge, ability, and comfortability with computers, Wal-Mart could have just kept on selling "naked" PCs and let the buyer both decide what to install and do the installation.
Apple Computer (Score:2)
Switch! [apple.com]
Re:The beast needs to be attacked one cell at a ti (Score:2)
Replacing their no-OS computers...
Apple's making thier systems ever more Linux frindly
So you can install Linux on an Apple system. So what? I can do that on any Wintel system...
IBM has given Linux their papal blessing
In the server market, which they previously used Unix in.
Peru and a few other enlightened Nation-states are considering Linux
Who's combined tech budget probably equals the budget for the Clippy development team at Microsoft, and who most likely weren't using Windows widely (older systems, most likely)...
ILM and the CG market is shifting to Linux
From mainly Unix and some Mac systems...
In short - none of the "victories" you've mentioned are really victories at all - they've had zero effect on Windows' market share. "Yay, Linux is beating Microsoft because some Unix users switched to Linux" doesn't make logical sense.
Re:The beast needs to be attacked one cell at a ti (Score:5, Insightful)
But the key point here is that this is Wal*Mart we are talking about, and what this move really means is that Wal*Mart might be doing something to Microsoft that they do to every other supplier in their supply chain: squeezing every dollar out of them they can. Seriously, Wal*Mart has (I believe) quarterly meetings with all of their suppliers whose sole real purpose is to find ways to get Wal*Mart the product they want to sell more cheaply. When the product is PCs, however, the discussion pretty quickly hits the brick wall of MS licensing fees, which I don't think can ever be made cheap enough for the Behemoth from Bentonville.
It is pretty clear (to me, anyway) that Wal*Mart is exactly the kind of company that could really do serious damage to Microsoft if their market share in PCs through Wal*Mart and Sam's Club stores turns it up a notch. At some point, you will see then *insisting* that (say) HP ditch Windows on the systems they sell, and use some cheap combination of Linux, StarOffice, and a browser like Mozilla to squeeze out an extra $50 or $100 on the cost. Grandma will then fire up the PC she got from Sam's, and the browser will work just fine as will the email and the simple word processor thingie. And that should be the moment when MS first knows genuine fear.
Anti-trust violations are *nothing* compared to the pain you can suffer at the hands of Wal*Mart. If Ballmer and company are lucky, they will have by that time retreated to the role of permanent leech on the corporate desktop and cable broadcaster. Not horrible businesses, but world domination will not be in the cards.
Browser wars? (Score:2)
I don't get it - the interview, especially. What does "new browser wars" mean these days? People arguing over which is better? That's always happening. Or are we talking the market?
Hopefully, it will be the standards [webstandards.org] that win out. If AOL does indeed adopt gecko into its client, standards will become a lot more important.
I don't buy the "browser wars" idea. Anyway, hopefully we designers and developers will just stick to the standards.
(yeah, right, i know. but a guy can dream, can't he? while he's not writing compliant xhtml and css? yeah)
Re:Browser wars? (Score:2)
War is hell (Score:2)
Mozilla?
Konqueror?
Dillo?
Opera?
I can't decide.
IE ? what's that? never heard of it.
Don't take his views so seriously... (Score:2)
I think Mark is missing the big picture here... (Score:5, Insightful)
1) A better browser than Netscape
2) Free as in beer
Amazing how some 'free software' advocates tend to side with the opposite on this argument. Netscape used to cost $50 a pop back in the day.
IE got its 'monopolistic market share' before Windows 98 integration. It simply won it over by being the best. I even remember running IE 3 on lil' old slowpoke Mac LC's back in the day... cause, seriously, who the fudge wanted to pay the Netscape license fee?
Netscape 4.x did them over. I'd rather stick pins though my eyes while simultaneously having my testicles placed into a Salad Shooter than use that browser. It would crash faster than I could type this sentence.
Mark is just a whiny little pansy, cause he lost the browser war. That cock Larry Ellison would be saying the same if tomorrow Microsoft decided to say "Well, hell, we're deciding to give SQL Server away for free now, just pay for support."
"But nooooo! It's not fair!"
-- Larry Ellison, 2003
Just to show how much of an idiot he is, this comes from the Oracle 9i site:
"Unbreakable
Can't break it. Oracle9i Database won't go down if your server fails and won't go down if your site fails."
Right. So the power supply on the server dies, and Milton from Office Space burns down the building, but Oracle keeps on running! Go Larry! Please, show me the car that keeps running when the f**king powertrain falls out of the hood. Puh-leeze.
Re:I think Mark is missing the big picture here... (Score:3, Insightful)
After 4.7 .... (Score:3, Insightful)
IE troll hole (Score:4, Informative)
here [slashdot.org] he distracts the reader's amusment from M$ including actual viruses on their CDs with a swipe at BIND.
here [slashdot.org] he tells us Lindows is second rate.
here [slashdot.org] is a real gem, where he calls free software advocates stupid, retarded and pubic hairless. Nice.
here [slashdot.org] we have a pure flame that was moderated well.
Well, there you have it, a typical M$ loudmouth. The man must mod himself.
Re:I think Mark is missing the big picture here... (Score:3, Insightful)
1) A better browser than Netscape
2) Free as in beer
Last time I checked, you needed to have a monopolistic share of the market to fund catching up with a competitor, then outrunning them, while at the same time as giving away that product for free.
I mean, wake up! Do you seriously think that IE has ever recouped it's cost? No, of course not. It's made a huge loss. Why can MS do this? Why, because they have a monopoly.
Who cares? (Score:4, Insightful)
Two seperate questions here, I think. For windows desktop users, IE is great (yeah, I know, security, but your average desktop user could care less). Microsoft isn't going to lose their marketshare without a seriously inferior product, and at the moment, it a hell of a lot better than Netscape's offering. I doubt Microsoft is worried about Opera either, and Opera makes a damn fine browser. But as much as some hate to admit it, the browser wars don't really matter. It's a sideshow, a commodity. Why should we really care? (And no, standard compliance isn't a good reason. We have that already.)
On the other hand, once you move to servers and/or *nix platforms, I don't see why anyone cares about Netscape or IE. You've got Opera, Lynx, Mozilla, and a half dozen others.
In fact, why are we using the release of Mozilla to talk about Netscape? To be absolutely blunt, Netscape deserves to die. Face it, their products have always been too little, too late - terminally behind the technology curve, and with horrible UI bugs (which might be better than security holes, but try telling Joe Sixpack that!).
Re:Who cares? (Score:2)
MS isn't paying me to say 'I wanna make my site to run on IE', the rest of the internet world said 'we are happy to use it'. Hate MS all you want, but they provided a common ground for Windows users (ie a huge population of the net) to view the web.
Mozilla or Opera or anybody else hoping to make a dent needs to be as good as IE, and better. I'm an Opera user because it has an MDI interface, MS doesn't support that. We dun wanna see stupid pop-up ads, and MS has a vested interest in NOT providing a feature to remove them.
Heck, if one really wanted to make a dent, they'd make a browser that's nearly %100 compatible with IE, then they'd create a new format to replace HTML to view. That approach is interesting because it's funny how ideas become viral like that.
I had an idea bout making a website that uses a theme that you download locally to your computer. The website just sends down the HTML and the graphics come up locally from your hard-drive, thus saving you oodles of time. I could even play games like have the entire site encapsulated into one big download, and fire that down to view locally. That last one'd take some custom programming to do, but has a very valuable place in the handheld market, as AvantGo illustrated.
Make a browser like that, and you got it made. Heck, even Macromedia sees that. Flash is sort of like that, except it's a plug-in instead of a seperate browser.
Anyway, hopefully you all get my point. For a browser to become a huge hit, it needs to be IE and a lot more. Slashdot could seriously promote that.
Re:Who cares? (Score:3, Interesting)
``Microsoft isn't going to lose their marketshare without a seriously inferior product, and at the moment, it a hell of a lot better than Netscape's offering''
I suspect you overlooked the fact that Netscape's latest offerings (labeled 6.x and 7.x) are in fact Mozilla. IMO Mozilla is a lot better than M$ Internet Exploiter. I do agree that Netscape 4.x is horrible, though, and I'm amazed that it is still the browser of choice on so many (especially commercial *NIX) systems.
``I doubt Microsoft is worried about Opera either, and Opera makes a damn fine browser.''
Opera indeed has a lot to say for it. It currently has the best standards-compliance of any browser that I am aware of, it's blazingly fast, and it runs on a number of operating systems. The reason that MicroSoft does not have to fear them is that one of two things must happen for Opera to grow bigger; either they must get distributed with some popular system (it is in fact distributed with Psion Revos, if I recall correctly, but those are not very widespread) or they must go open source, in which case they will get support from a large community currently supporting Mozilla. As things are going now, Opera will eventually be surpassed by Mozilla (except probably in speed and size, but that will leave it with only the embedded market, so it would never become big on desktop systems). I feel sorry, because I loved Opera on Windows, but on Linux it isn't quite up to the stability and feature-richness that Mozilla has.
``Why should we really care? (And no, standard compliance isn't a good reason. We have that already.)''
In fact, standards compliance is why I care, and why every webmaster _should_ care. As long as M$ (or whoever happend to be biggest) keeps not conforming to standards, webmasters have to develop multiple versions of their code, or lose a portion of their visitors. Now maybe some don't mind having to do more work in exchange for more $$, but I think it's a Bad Thing.
``In fact, why are we using the release of Mozilla to talk about Netscape?''
How about because they are one and the same? All Netscape does since they were bought by AOL is releasing versions of Mozilla under the more familiar label Netscape, with some tech support. IMHO that's a good thing, because it might get some people/companies/BOFHs/... that are afraid to get their feet wet on OSS to use a decent browser.
With the advent of Mozilla 1.0, Netscape 4.x can finally be buried, and developers can start developing against a stable ABI, making Mozilla ever greater. I've heard rumors that AOL will be using Mozilla instead of M$IE as the base for their product, and even though I don't particularly like AOL, that will generate a lot of Mozilla users, so that more people might actually consider Mozilla when writing webpages. Perhaps that will prompt M$ to make their browser compatible (especially if they can't ship it with their OS anymore), and we will all be better off.
---
Depart not from the path which fate has assigned you.
Re:Who cares? (Score:2)
Yes, but a castrated version of it. For example, they took out the popup killer code - one of the most popular features - for obvious reasons: AOL/TW depends on popups for revenues. There's no compelling reason to move from IE to NS - there's a few good reasons to move from IE to Mozilla, though.
Re:Who cares? (Score:2)
Dude,
Mail out Mozilla on CD's, (a 'la AOL) (Score:2, Interesting)
Is there any coincidence between AOL's subscriber base and the fact that they have mailed out zillions of CD's to sign up for their 'service'?
IE is the default browser for 'commoners', because it's there when they turn on Windows. AOL got their software in everybody's hands via snail mail.
Maybe find some method of getting Mozilla to every person's mailbox, and you might have a shot.
Not that I'd bet my money on it, though.
Though Marc did make the hypothetical scenerio of AOL bundling Mozilla with AOL CD's (hence, the existing means of getting Mozilla to everybody), however states that AOL has no internal motive for getting browser market share.
Not that I think they should.... personally, the higher the percentage of the world using a single browser version, the further along advanced web-based development could progress, because gone is the issue of making everything compatible with the lowest common denomanator.
He has a point... (Score:5, Interesting)
But the end of his article makes the most compelling argument to abandon Internet Explorer for Mozilla - form factor! I'm proud to proclaim that I, for one, love the Mozilla form factor. It beats IE hands down - skins, tabbed browsing... and the fact that it's open source doesn't hurt my opinion of it either. It's just more friendly - and that's where you really win users. It's not how you corner a market (MS never could have done it if they were friendly), but it's how you get a cult following. Props to the Mozilla team! And don't listen to the naysayers.
Re:He has a point... (Score:2)
Once they saw me using tabs they wanted to have tabs too. A crack in the armor? Well, we've been playing status wars based on the RC version number we had installed, (I trumped 1.0 with 1.1a, hee hee) and no one is using IE to browse the web anymore. They were familar with skins because of winamp. Now MS "themes" seem to be a joke.
Re:He has a point... (Score:2)
I'm proud to say that Opera has had the elegant "form factor" well before mozilla did, and it's still a 3meg browser (vs. 8MB of Mozilla).
Re:He has a point... (Score:3, Interesting)
The current state of the "browser war" reminds me of the old hippie saying, "What if they had a war and nobody came?" The only time they'd notice if they were using a different browser is when they got to a browser specific site. But to the nontechnical, it's just another dead site. There are a lot of dead/broken sites on the internet. Everyone eventually comes across a few.
I tend to write my code so that NS4.x sees it ok. That's because it's the browser I used before konqueror & kmeleon(?), and most code tested on ns4 looks at least ok w/ other browsers.
Re:He has a point... (Score:2)
What the end user wants is largely just transparent viewing of web pages. Standards compliance, essentially. This has long been the point of webstandards.org, and I think it just makes sense.
If Mozilla is easier to use and setup, people will use it. If it doesn't crash, and it is robust with it's rendering of HTML... people will use it. If it get's in the way of the user, whatever excuse you might have, people will not use it.
Browser wars over? (Score:3, Interesting)
I converted. (Score:3, Interesting)
But 1.0 has honestly taken over as a browser for me. I very rarely use any other browsers anymore, and it has taken over, at least on my desktop, as my main browser.
This isn't for some pseudo-religious reason, this isn't zealotry, I just really really like it.
It's fast, which matters on the older machines I have in the house, and the "open in new tab" thing...
It's such a simple thing, tabbing browser windows instead of opening them in new windows...
...but it makes all the difference for me. I can't use a browser without it anymore, and it hooked me within 5 minutes of firing it up.
Great feature. If only it would detect installed plugins and use them automatically instead of forcing me to either set up all of my helper applications manually or re-install all of the plugins, it would be the perfect newbie experience.
I didn't expect to like it. But I do.
He sounds like a burnout... (Score:2, Interesting)
Frankly, it sounds like Andreesson's not really interested in browsers anymore. All that he seems to care about in that arena is marketshare. I think that he gave up the browser as dead and made a concious decision to move on with his life.
I can't really blame the guy. He put a lot of time and energy into creating Netscape, only to see his company get maliciously crushed by Microsoft. That's an emotionally grueling experience, and I'm not surprised that he's not as enthusiastic about browsers as he used to be. I'd much rather hear his take on the future of web services and what Loudcloud's doing these days.
Forever is a long time (Score:5, Insightful)
As the Mozilla codebase improves in the light of public scrutiny and the IE codebase becomes older and more obscure, things will start to change. It will become cheaper and cheaper to produce a new browser implementation for a specific application based on Mozilla. At the same time, the bills for the continued development of IE will start to pile up for MS. IE will get less attention from coders. Mozilla will get more. In the long run, costs will dictate the outcome and IE will lose.
That's my prediction. Just look what happened to Linux, and look how long it took. Have patience.
Re:Forever is a long time (Score:2, Interesting)
The IE codebase has become stale, with a little optimization, since the death of Netscape (probably late 2000). IE has offered no real new features, except the new
They destroyed the competition, then offered nothing to the customer in exchange for removing the option of Free market in this field, I for one am glad Mozilla is doing as well as it is; and if AOL/TW start semi-pushing it it will catch on. ATM it is technically/really a better product than IE on *any platform*, and judging by the 1.1a release it's only going to keep improving.
Cause you know.... (Score:2, Funny)
Microsoft can't be conquered. (Score:2)
Too many people use IE, and since alot of people use IE, alot of websites are designed for it. When a user can't view a webpage correctly in Netscape/Mozilla, what do they do? Run IE! (Unless there's no better alternative, or the hardcore Slashdotter absoultely refuses to put his/her hands anywhere NEAR a MS product.
Off the topic of this post, those random exclamation (!) marks in that article were kind of annoying...
Re:Microsoft can't be conquered. (Score:2)
Re:Microsoft can't be conquered. (Score:2)
The lack of chance for ordinary user to try out these open source browser, rather than IE only sites, is the greatest problem nowadays.
Dear sysadmins, we need your help. If your intranet is flooded with IE only page, I agree you cannot do much. But, for most university/high school/public library etc, I don't really think IE is really that crucial.
OT: Mozilla's place on my desktop (Score:2)
Although, to tell you the truth, I found myself browsing with Mozilla for quite a while yesterday without realizing I wasn't in IE. It's a remarkable effort from the Mozilla.org team. Now if only Ctrl-N would pop open a cloned window, instead of a new one that loads he homepage.
Biased answers: Andreessen was BOUGHT (Score:3, Interesting)
Andreessen: Generally, Microsoft is a partner of Loudcloud, and we work really well with them at Loudcloud because we support their technology and we have a bunch of customers running on Windows. So we don't take formal positions on remedies or lawsuits.
(Bold emphasis mine)
Can you say S-E-L-L-O-U-T?
Not sure I agree (Score:2)
Microsoft focused on the target with IE4, hit a grand slam out of the park, and hasn't really been focusing on the game since. If the browser war is to return, I believe it will be due to quality problems in IE.
BTW - I wish Microsoft would fix the png bugs which have existed for a couple versions. Makes image creation a major pain in the butt.
-Pete
Bunk Bunk Bunk!!! (Score:2)
I bet a lot of the people who didn't quit, and still work at netscape feel the same way. I really don't have much of a view on the subject, as I joined the company almost 1 year to the day after they got bought by AOL.
On top of that, I seem to have become the unofficial netscape-flag holding troll on here.
Christ, I dunno, I take a lot of pride in my work at the company, and when he goes and says shit like this, it honestly feels like a kick in the balls to me, and to everyone who is still working on the browser. Fuck, I work with 5 people on my team (out of 9) who were around back before AOL bought the company. he just pretty much slapped them in the face.
Anyhow, fuck it, I'm outta here.
Re:Bunk Bunk Bunk!!! (Score:2)
So when did Opera go Open Source? (Score:3, Insightful)
IDG: How about just the idea of having an open source browser, the Opera Web browser for instance.!
Doh!
Try competing with Microsoft... (Score:4, Insightful)
The cool thing is that Microsoft has tried competing with Sony and Nintendo, and they are losing like crazy to Sony. Nintendo will ultimately beat Microsoft as well, giving them a little piece of long-overdue humble pie to digest for a while...
Whose License is it, anyway? (Score:2)
(open source) is clearly not compelling yet or (Opera)
Sigh; Opera's not open source. Of all the reasons to discount open source right now, the success or failure of Opera doesn't seem to be one of them.
I thought the term "open source" was supposed to help us eliminate the confusion between software-gratis and software-with-freedoms-included.
How fair is his opinion ? (Score:3, Insightful)
So, Andreessen is saying: we are partners of M$, we have to kiss M$'s ass. Can we trust his opinion on browser wars ?.
Re:How fair is his opinion ? (Score:3, Insightful)
Andreesen, you pussy.
I guess we know who wears the panties in that relationship.
definitely a burnout case... (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately,I have no knowledge of Netscape that anyone else couldn't get through the media, so these are merely the opinions of someone willing to question the popular perceptions.
I'm not trying to disparage the man, but IMHO, he's shown no particular managerial skills or any aspects of a true visionary. I expect Loudcloud to quietly burn through its VC financing, and slip beneath the waves, just another dot-com bomb.
The fact that he's so willing to accept that just because Microsoft owns the market today, they will always and forever do so, should discredit him as a man of imagination.
Just for a second, image the consequences of a hypothetical event like Homeland Security deciding to hold individual (and corporate) computer users responsible for the viruses their systems propagate, in an attempt to wake people up to responsible operation of their computers. In such a scenario, it wouldn't take more than a few highly-publicized cases of clueless PC users whose systems launch DOS attacks being prosecuted to change the dynamics of the marketplace significantly.
Change Happens -- All the Time.
No visionary expects the future to be anything like the present.
Why history will remember Andreesen, not Clark (Score:3, Insightful)
Out of curiosity, were you around on the Internet in 1993-1994? Marc was the lead developer who came up with this incredibly addictive toy whose usage was doubling every month and generating a huge stir. I avoided it for six months in late 1993 and early 1994 having heard how cool and addictive it was, lest I further neglect my studies. It was really the first piece of software that blended three elements: hypertext information retrieval, GUI ease-of-use, and layering that on the worldwide Internet infrastructure. (A decent account of what he did, and which elements were new, can be found at MIT's Inventor's Dimension [mit.edu].) Don't underestimate that GUI component, which was Marc's main contribution; it's what made the Internet accessible to the masses.
Clark was a techie turned capitalist who, having failed to figure out how to take the 3D graphics technology he had pioneered at SGI and make money in the upcoming PC 3D graphics revolution (which he foresaw, but ducked: full 3D on a chip costing $20 and selling on PCs for $30-200) was looking for some new arena where he could 'win' and turned his attention to how to make a buck on this new "Mosaic" thing. He succeeded brilliantly, but as with SGI, he never figured out how to take a technology he had pioneered and turn it into a business with a defensible end-game. Clark has some business sense but I think his virtues are a lot more a shrewd sense of timing and trends than an ability to build a sustainable business. This might be too harsh on him; perhaps it was an impossible task given his "competition": the leverage of Microsoft. But the failures at SGI and Netscape were failures of business vision and strategy, his responsibility, not failures of the technology guys, Mark Andreesen (or, say, Kurt Akeley).
I'd agree with you that Jim Clark was responsible for giving Marc the name recognition that he has today... Clark did this I presume since he recognized that anyone could go build a browser, but only one company would have the "inventor of the browser" on their staff and the insight, marketing, and recruiting advantages that would bring. Without that, Marc would only be as famous as, say, Tim Berners-Lee. You've heard of him, I notice. And I'd agree that Marc Andreesen noticed the missing pieces in part because he was at the right place at the right time, developing software at a university that was a supercomputing center hooked into the physics community of Tim Berners Lee, etc. But it was Marc who saw how to turn a hypertext system for publishing physics papers and linking footnotes into a mass medium.
Marc's vision was innovative and technical and it succeeded. Jim Clark's vision was business-oriented and capitalistic (which is no crime) and it failed after making a few rich. Now who deserves accolades as the visionary?
--LinuxParanoid, who didn't have enough vision to accept that offer to attend University of Illinois in the early 90s...
Mozilla 1.0 still feels like a beta release (Score:2, Insightful)
Large and bloated... It takes forever to load compared to IE
Pages take longer to load
Has annoying little UI bugs that keep popping up (ex. Typing in a new URL on the address bar occasionally causes the current page to reload, instead of going to the new page; focus doesn't always move to a field when you click on it, etc...)
Doesn't consistantly display pages correctly-I have pages that will display on my copy of Mozilla that my coworker can't get to display on his.
The average user doesn't have the slightest dea what open source means, or care about it at all unless they have been brainwashed into being as anti-Microsoft as a lot of the people on here are.
Mozilla definately has promise, and I love some of the developer tools that come with it, but I don't think the average user will put up with the many little annoyances I've found in it. It still has a LOT of work before I think it will be any sort of a threat to IE.
I think Mozilla has a chance.. (Score:2)
Well, I didn't bother reading the article (because hey, this is slashdot), but I must say that I've actually had really good success convincing my intermediately-computer-skilled friends to use Mozilla. They don't have any sort of browser loyalty. I just showed them tabbed browsing with middle click, ad blocking, the sidebar, and they decided that it was better than IE.
That, and, I hear AOL is switching to NS6?
Anyway, why does it matter? Mozilla has enough users and developers now to support it as an open source project, so winning or losing the browser "war" doesn't mean much to those of us who just want a good browser to use..
There is still a war... (Score:2)
<pulling analysis out of butt>
I'd say MS keeps a majority of the 'traditional' desktop, but I think Apple/*BSD/Linux will take a far larger part than most people are giving them credit for. The questions then will be
a) does MS really leverage IE (i.e. start adding major features that don't/won't play well with other browsers) simply to drive the desktop?
b) does MS really leverage IE because they want to make it (as a part of the
The desktop is their cash cow, but if
<GRUNT... more analysis out of rectum>
My guess,
I did my part (Score:2, Interesting)
So recently, that lovely klez virus ran right through my dad's computer without him even knowing it. Thanks for his email client of choice, Outlook Express (Without any patches at all) he got a whole bunch of errors when trying to send mail. People with virus scanners were sending automated messages back to my Dad informing him of klez.
As usual my Dad calls me over to fix it. I explain to him just how flawed and insecure Outlook is. How that even with all these patches you can download and install, there will be exploits popping up in no time at all. My Dad didn't like the sound of that so he asked me what his alternatives where.
I layed out the few for him, Eudora, TheBat, and Mozilla. Perfectly timed, this whole klez incident happened a few days after Mozilla 1.0 was released. I eagerly told him about this browser+email client that after 4 years of amazing development, has finally reached 1.0 status. Him not being too fazed by all this asked me what I should pick for him. I went on to explain that Mozilla was pretty much no where near open to exploition as Internet Explorer or Outlook. Right away he said show me.
I installed it for him and showed him his way around. He has a large address book which he was worried would be lost, but Mozilla imported it perfectly. Within 5 minutes he was all up to speed on how to make it work.
So at least he's using the email part of Mozilla, but I'm sure with enough time and effort I can convert him to use the browser instead of IE. He mostly cares about his bookmarks since he has about 1000 of them organized. So I showed him that Mozilla already imports them. His mini-preview of the browser has been positive so far. Now I only need to take the step further to show him that it's also safer to surf the web with Mozilla.
Do your part, tell people how much better Mozilla is at web and email.
Andreessen = Troll? (Score:2, Insightful)
"The bad news is the browser is kind of done" he says, well I hardly think so. Personally I feel the way the Internet works currently is irksome and could use a ton of tweaking. Indeed, there is only so much one can do to comply with standards, but it's taking those standards and actually doing something with it. Tabbed browsing, advanced print control, faster load times, better download support, built in anti-pop up, meta refresh notification and so much more! We must being taking the browsers beyond displaying a web page and actually providing useful information or helping the user browse more efficiently.
Ford didn't say "alright guys, you know, this car is certainly going forward, backward, left and right well enough, I don't think there's too much more we can really do...", no, he and his predecessors kept thinking up new ideas, making their cars safer, easier to handle, more fuel efficient, quieter, sleeker and so much more. He went beyond the basics of forward, backward, left and right and built a company on innovation. If Andreessen doesn't realize this then I don't think he's someone that should be heading the project to take on Microsoft.
There are many more advancements a browser could be made to do or support, we're only entering the knee of the bend here, we're starting to look up high, this isn't the time to be afraid of heights.
ShareZilla (Score:3, Informative)
Andreessen not a neutral observer! (Score:3, Insightful)
In the end, though, Microsoft didn't win the browser war -- open standards did.
Re:Mozilla has won (Score:2)
Steve Balmer "Give it up for ME!!!!!!" [milkandcookies.com]
RonB
Re:It's kinda interesting to read (Score:2)
Re:I DID read the article... (Score:5, Interesting)
then in enters mozilla
add on top of that features and time to market. mozilla is a rapidly developing browser. it took a while to get where it is today, but lots of that has been foundation. now it's being rapidly refined and innovated. IE just can't/won't do that. it's part of the OS after all
Re:I DID read the article... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I DID read the article... (Score:2)
The problem with this comment is that a sufficiently entrenched browser BECOMES a standard, RFC's and "the community's opinion" notwithstanding. Remember when IE was the pitiful underling and Netscape ruled all? Netscape advanced the neat idea of "frames" -- nonstandard, but it BECAME a standard overnight as people rushed to take advantage of it. Same thing with IE: after IE won the browser wars you saw everyone rushing to make damn sure their sites were "IE compliant". Nobody gave much thought to whether it was standards compliant. Why? Folks don't view web pages with a "standard", they view it with a browser. If one browser owns 95% of the market, it IS a standard, like it or not.
Re:I DID read the article... (Score:2, Informative)
on your frames example, it just shows how using a non-standard technology can bite you in the arse. the RFC's and standards in general are all about generating public debates on the usefullness of technologies and to allow other ideas to surface in the process. propriatary technologies are just that, some isolated idea from a cube farm that manages to work it's way into the next product. not really the best way to innovate.
Re:I DID read the article... (Score:2)
Get it through your head that product A does NOT have to be demonstrably better than product B, so long as product A is provided in a more convenient manner, or product B is more of a pain to obtain. While this may chafe our sense of technological "rightness", it is reality.
Re:Very valid point (Score:5, Insightful)
Being Free Software has made Mozilla hundreds of times more popular than it should be. Heck, if Mozilla wasn't Free Software probably no one would be using it. For years it was hardly useable, and yet people (like me) still fired it up.
Now it is actually good, but Microsoft has all of the marketshare. The few people that are using it are almost without doubt using it because it is Free Software. Because it is Free Software, and because it is very cool, it is even being used in new projects which will undoubtedly drive its acceptance.
My guess is that in the long run it will even continue to gain converts, but this is only because it is Free. I don't personally think it would grow its userbase even if they gave it away but kept the source code. The only reason that people are interested in it is that they know that they can build on it, but that is quite likely to be enough to keep it alive and growing.
grassroots promotion (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The fight (Score:2)
There's billions of people in the world that never use Microsoft product. Fighting means doing something, not just ignoring the problem.