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Mozilla The Internet

Andreessen on the Browser Wars 550

Posted by michael from the if-you-can't-beat-em dept.
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."
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Andreessen on the Browser Wars More

Andreessen on the Browser Wars

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  • Netscape as AOL backup plan... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by javacowboy ( 222023 ) on Friday June 14, 2002 @11:14PM (#3705899)
    This is an interesting except:

    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 ... to get better terms. They could say, 'We own Netscape, and we're willing to use Internet Explorer, but if you don't give us distribution through the Windows desktop we're going to use Netscape and we're going to double its market share overnight and cause you guys lots of problems.' There's no internal goal at AOL, or at l! east when I was there, to go get browser market share.

    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...
    • Mozilla/Netscape 6 wasn't ready for mass adoption even if AOL wanted to switch their tens of millions of users away from IE really badly. AOL could've thrown some more resources at Mozilla/Netscape 6, but due to diminishing returns it probably wouldn't have been ready all that much earlier.

  • Doesn't this sound realistic? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rblancarte ( 213492 ) on Friday June 14, 2002 @11:15PM (#3705901) Homepage
    I agree Mozilla is the /.er's dream - the public hardly knows about it. Heck, I would venture to say that there is a HUGE group that doesn't even know about Netscape anymore. Look at Opera, which is a very sound browser in it's own right - it's user base is extremely limited, and it has been out for a good number of years.

    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
    • I have Opera running on my Zaurus. Now granted that 32Mb is not very much memory these days the damn thing crashes after about three pages. Now back in 1992 we used to use X11 workstations with 32 Mb of memory and a browser would run just fine. Granted the Zaurus has a few problems wih being a first release but there is no way that Microsoft would have released such bloatware for a handheld device...

      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).

      • So why are you are using Opera on a Zarus rather than IE on Pocket PC?

        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.

    • 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.

      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.

    • personally, i'm not a big linux fan. I've tried it, and am persevering to learn linux.
      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!!!!!
    • 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.

      Or an act of law. There's a patch coming up from MS that removes IE. Probably pressured by their anti-trust case.

  • Interviewer is a dolt (Score:5, Informative)

    by mlinksva ( 1755 ) on Friday June 14, 2002 @11:15PM (#3705906) Homepage Journal
    Let's see, Opera is open source and Andreessen joined Netscape early. The first is totally false, the second is of secondary importance. Andreessen co-wrote Mosaic. Guess IDG reporters don't remember that. What other stupid errors can you spot?
    • Whoever edited the interview text is a dolt, too. Running Mozilla, there are many exclamation marks littering the text, serving no apparent purpose.

    • Re:Interviewer is a dolt (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MisterBlister ( 539957 ) on Friday June 14, 2002 @11:25PM (#3705972) Homepage
      The funny part is that Mark didn't seem to realize Opera wasn't OSS either, unless the interview was edited way past the point of journalistic integrity.

      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.

    • "visionary Marc Andreessen" (Score:3, Informative)

      by Pac ( 9516 )
      As far as I remember, Andreessen was a competent programmer who was able to make a big buck by transfering intelectual property from an open source/freeware inniciative (Mosaic) to a privately owned enterprise more or less exactly at the right moment. All "vision" he might have had was poured upon (into?) his head by "whatwashisname", Netscape founder and first CEO.
      • ah, but Mosaic was NOT open sourc, although the NCSA version was free to download. If it had been, we would have a totally different world today. A company called Spyglass got the rights from NCSA to the Mosaic code. Spyglass licensed it to Microsoft for (monumentally bad decision) a percentage of the sale price. Had there been a minimum in that contract, IE couldn't have been distributed free, all the Spyglass shareholders would now be retired, and who knows what else--maybe it would have prevented the bundling with the OS and we wouldn't have gotten the antitrust decision.

        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.

  • Browser war, schmowser war (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Who really cares? We've got a great browser named Mozilla now, with great features, great standards support and a great feature. As long as people care about Mozilla it will continue.

    "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!
    • Who really cares? We've got a great browser named Mozilla now, with great features, great standards support and a great feature. As long as people care about Mozilla it will continue.

      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.

  • You never know... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by norweigiantroll ( 582720 ) on Friday June 14, 2002 @11:17PM (#3705920)
    With AOL 8.0 using a Gecko derivative you never know. Of course it helps IE a lot that it comes with M$'s OS. If only Apple saw the light and made Mozilla their default browser. I thought they were into Open Source?
  • IDG: How about just the idea of having an open source browser, the Opera Web browser for instance.! Is that beneficial to users or developers?

    Andreessen: How much (browser) market share does Opera have?

    Seems like a discussion between two people who are a bit out of it...

    • How so? Opera's market share of the total browser market is pitifully tiny compared to the IE juggernaut. It may be "huge" in the sense of it being a very popular alternative to IE, but since IE has about 95% of the market, even if Opera were THE ONLY alternative, they'd only have 5% of the market. That's TINY, practically INSIGNIFICANT in the grand scheme of things.

      Please note I'm no IE flag waiver, nor am I an Opera defender/accuser, I'm just making an observation here.
    • The interviewer definitely didn't know what he was talking about...

      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)

    by d0n quix0te ( 304783 ) on Friday June 14, 2002 @11:20PM (#3705943)
    Andreesen is wrong about a few things. MS can be combated successfully. The trick is to not play their game of proprietary software on a platform they control. No one can succeed in that territory. The trick is not to succumb to their tactics, and to stay agile and ahead of them

    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.
    • It's also always darkest before it goes pitch black.

      :)
    • Well, MS does not really have a way of combating Mozilla. How are they going to undermine a free product.

      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).

      • it's the corporate market that shapes the consumer markets. people will use the same products at home that they're use to at work. once some large corporations make moz/nn once again the browser of choice in their environment, ie will start to loose it's market share.

        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...
    • Andreesen is wrong about a few things. MS can be combated successfully. The trick is to not play their game of proprietary software on a platform they control. No one can succeed in that territory. The trick is not to succumb to their tactics, and to stay agile and ahead of them.

      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.
      • For your AVERAGE consumer something has to be exponentially better before they will eschew it in favor of the bundled item.

        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.

        • 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.

          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.

      • 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.

        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.
    • Apple's making thier systems ever more Linux frindly
      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.

      • "And I suspect most of the masses are...going to...reformat the hard disk..."

        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.

    • Don't forget Apple's recent campaign:

      Switch! [apple.com]
    • Wal-Mart's loading Linux on their dirt-cheap PCs for the masses
      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)

        by King Babar ( 19862 ) on Saturday June 15, 2002 @01:28AM (#3706443) Homepage
        Wal-Mart's loading Linux on their dirt-cheap PCs for the masses
        Replacing their no-OS computers...

        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.

  • 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)

    • How many non-technical people do you know who actually give a shit about standards? Most likely none - if it works in IE, they're happy. Mozilla's never gonna win the browser war just because it conforms better to standards. It needs to come bundled with some popular program or something to get it mass-market exposure without users having to go out and download it on their own.
  • There's a browser war being fought on my desktop everyday, which one do I use?

    Mozilla?

    Konqueror?

    Dillo?

    Opera?

    I can't decide.

    IE ? what's that? never heard of it.

  • Andreessen: (Pause). I don't think so. For mass market adoption (open source) is clearly not compelling yet or (Opera) would have more adoption than it does.
    He doesn't even know Opera is not an open-source project but is instead sold by these guys. [opera.com]

  • I think Mark is missing the big picture here... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Verizon Guy ( 585358 ) on Friday June 14, 2002 @11:21PM (#3705949) Homepage
    Netscape didn't lose because Microsoft had a 'monoloplistic share of the market.' It lost because IE was:

    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.
    • This was modded as "flamebait" because it wasn't anti-MS but I think that you are right on the money. Mark is whining. Look at Opera, it IS competing well. It would have done better if they weren't so late at implementing a decent DHTML rendering engine. But now that they have, you should check your weblogs - I was surprised. I use both Opera and IE (mainly IE), and once Opera is a good as IE in rendering (it's waaay better in features and security and speed, but rendering is the most important thing for me), I will PAY for it, even though the cost of IE is part of the OS (which makes sense to most anyone but anti-MS people) because I believe in paying for good software (whethor through code contribution for OSS or via my money for CSS).

    • After 4.7 .... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Mulletproof ( 513805 )
      After Version 4.7, Netscape turned to solid crap. Yeah, it began to look better but it was slower than molassus and buggier than Aliens. Parent is right in that respect. All IE did was endure. Netscape killed itself and the other browsers were just crawling from under the rocks, still evolving into something actually worth competing with. IE won by defalt then fortified it's position by integrating it into Windows, which, contrary to popular belief is not monopolistic practice. It's their OS, their program. MS has the right to do whatever the hell they want to it; Even make it hostile to other applications. Their external business practices on the other hand...

    • IE troll hole (Score:4, Informative)

      by twitter ( 104583 ) on Saturday June 15, 2002 @11:26AM (#3707670) Homepage Journal
      Verizon Guy says, IE rocks, Netscape sucks, then takes swing at Larry Ellison. Looks like flame bait to me, but that's nothing new from the Verizon Guy.

      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.

    • Netscape didn't lose because Microsoft had a 'monoloplistic share of the market.' It lost because IE was:

      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)

    by Cody Hatch ( 136430 ) <cody@PARISchaos.net.nz minus city> on Friday June 14, 2002 @11:22PM (#3705952) Homepage
    Since this is Slashdot, I suspect I'm going to get modded down right quick, but...

    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!).
    • I agree with just about everything you said, I just wanted to append one thing: If you're a web developer, why do you care about anything but IE? Everybody has it. Unless your site is about *nix, you want people to see your site. Everybody running Windows has IE no matter what.

      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)

      by RAMMS+EIN ( 578166 )
      Funny they would actually mod that up...

      ``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.
      • I suspect you overlooked the fact that Netscape's latest offerings (labeled 6.x and 7.x) are in fact Mozilla.

        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.
    • Since this is Slashdot, I suspect I'm going to get modded down right quick, but...

      Dude, /. rule #1 in the getting moderation: to get moderated up, say you won't get moderated up.



  • 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)

    by InspectorZero ( 471161 ) on Friday June 14, 2002 @11:23PM (#3705956)
    Andreessen has a point - the browser is, in probably 95% of cases, practically invisible to the user these days. The average user doesn't care enough to start another browser war. And really, what good would a browser war do at this point? It will be impossible to de-throne MS until someone comes up with a compelling new service or feature that MS doesn't and/or can't immediately offer. I don't know if that's even possible.

    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.
    • Gotta agree on the form factor. Standards compliance doesn't matter to my MS using friends because they just don't care if its broken if they can't tell its broken. ("As long as I keep taking the Heroin I feel fine.")

      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.
    • I'm proud to proclaim that I, for one, love the Mozilla form factor.

      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)

      by jred ( 111898 )
      Most people don't even know what browser they use. I've seen people with three browsers installed, but they can't tell you which app they use. They have to click on the "internet button", to show you. This icon can be anything from a fish to a spaceship, and it'd take much less than 10,000 monkeys to come up with the name.

      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.
    • You won't see another browser war. Netscape is in no position to try adding proprietary HTML tags like they did with their prior versions. At this point I don't believe Microsoft has much interest either, as they have more important fish to fry with .Net.

      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)

    by blackula ( 584329 ) on Friday June 14, 2002 @11:23PM (#3705957)
    Andreessen doesn't seem to see the big picture. The browser wars on Windows may be over, but he fails to realize that on Linux, they are just beginning. With more and more people "seeing the light," Netscape, Mozilla, and Konqueror will become the dominant web browsers, as MSIE is left in the dust. Perhaps if Microsoft releases an IE for Linux they can retain some market share; otherwise, we can start to say so long to an IE-centric web and hello to uniform standards.

  • I converted. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by AugstWest ( 79042 ) on Friday June 14, 2002 @11:26PM (#3705978)
    I've tried occasional milestone builds over the years, and not liked them. I can't deal with using Netscape, it bugs me for some odd reason.

    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.

  • 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)

    by Kohath ( 38547 ) on Friday June 14, 2002 @11:31PM (#3706000)
    What are the chances people are going to be using IE 30 years from now versus something that originated from the Mozilla codebase?

    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.
    • I agree with what you said, and I'd like to add something.

      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 .NET stuff, since the removed the competition from market. If IE had continued inovating at the earlier pace (CSS, vrml, ect ect) after they destroyed the competition, I might be sympathetic to them, but as it stands they have performed the #1 no no in our economy.

      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.
  • if mighty Marc couldn't do it, no one can.
  • Aside from the fact that Microsoft has 93% of the browser marketshare, many websites are designed to be viewed with Internet Explorer. As long as the majority of the operating system marketshare is owned by Microsoft, you can guarantee that the majority of the browser marketshare will be, too.

    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...
    • Well obviously if I can't view it in moz I just use lynx!
    • Our university network has just changed the default browser to Mozilla. The users do not seem to have too much (if any) bad feeling.

      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.

  • Mozilla 1.0 got installed on my machine for one reason: they've got the best mail client this side of pine. I've always enjoyed NSmail, and Mozilla has continued the fine tradition, even improving it with the multiple POP accounts (although I've switched to IMAP exclusively).

    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)

    by whizzmo ( 239423 ) on Friday June 14, 2002 @11:37PM (#3706034)
    I would like to direct your attention to an answer Marc gave to a question about the MS Antitrust proceedings. For those who didn't RTFA, Loudcloud is Marc's new business...

    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?
  • I am not sure if I agree with all of his comments about the browser war being dead. Specifically, since IE4 was released, the quality of the browser has been decreasing fast. IE5.5 was a good release, thanks to the throwing out the WIN32 code base and backporting the Mac version of IE. IE 5.0 was rubbish, and I use Mozilla on my Win 2000 box instead of IE6 because it is more stable.

    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
  • Being as he hasn't worked at netscape for about 3 years, and since then has started a startup with little to nothing going for it other than "OOH!! IT'S MARCA FROM NETSCAPE!!!" I personally think it's complete bunk.

    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.

  • So when did Opera go Open Source? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Phil Hands ( 2365 ) on Friday June 14, 2002 @11:55PM (#3706093) Homepage
    From the interview:

    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)

    by Pingsmoth ( 249222 ) on Saturday June 15, 2002 @12:01AM (#3706113) Homepage
    "My attitude is, everybody should try competing with Microsoft once in their life. Once."

    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...

  • (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)

    by InodoroPereyra ( 514794 ) on Saturday June 15, 2002 @12:11AM (#3706144)
    From the interview:
    IDG: Nine states and the District of Columbia, in their pursuit of tough antitrust remedies on Microsoft that go beyond what the company agreed to in its proposed settlement with the Department of Justice ( news - web sites), have fought to force Microsoft to give away the code to Internet Explorer. If the judge approves that remedy proposal, do you see any benefit to users and developers?

    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.

    So, Andreessen is saying: we are partners of M$, we have to kiss M$'s ass. Can we trust his opinion on browser wars ?.

    • 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.

      Andreesen, you pussy.

      I guess we know who wears the panties in that relationship.

  • definitely a burnout case... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by constantnormal ( 512494 ) on Saturday June 15, 2002 @12:20AM (#3706174)
    It always surprises me that people treat Marc Andreessen as a "visionary". As I see it, he's a programmer of some talent who happened to be in the right place at the right time to be tapped by Jim Clark (the REAL visionary) to take his browser (which he did not invent, but merely polished the creation of Tim Berners-Lee) and try and make a new industry with it. Without Jim Clark (not just his money, but his business sense and entrepreneurial spirit), nobody would know Marc Andreessen today. So far as I can see, he's no more deserving of that kind of respect than any of a number of folks at Netscape. The ARE kudos that the folks at Netscape deserve, as the people at Netscape did an enormous amount to develop many of the technologies that have made the WWW what it is today -- but I don't see that Mr Andreessen deserves any more credit than anyone else.

    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.
    • It always surprises me that people treat Marc Andreessen as a "visionary". As I see it, he's a programmer of some talent who happened to be in the right place at the right time to be tapped by Jim Clark (the REAL visionary) to take his browser (which he did not invent, but merely polished the creation of Tim Berners-Lee) and try and make a new industry with it. Without Jim Clark (not just his money, but his business sense and entrepreneurial spirit), nobody would know Marc Andreessen today.

      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...
  • As soon as someone makes a product that can compete with IE, then MS might have to worry. For now Mozilla does have some strong points, but to the average user used to IE, Mozilla is

    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.


  • 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..
  • But it is no longer a brower war. It is now an OS war. IE will own the Win desktop unless MS does something REALLY stupid. The question is can anyone wrest away desktop market share?

    <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 .NET inititive) a source of revenue (i.e. start adding major features that don't/won't play well with other browsers and port it to every viable desktop)?

    The desktop is their cash cow, but if .NET takes off the way they want it to you may actually see something like IE (or whatever it morphs into under .NET) for Linux, since the desktop becomes less relevant.

    <GRUNT... more analysis out of rectum>

    My guess, .NET doesn't come 1/10 to the vision they had 2 years ago, is still pretty neat technology, and they use it to continue to drive the desktop. I doubt MS's port .NET framework will exist for *BSD in five years.

  • I did my part (Score:2, Interesting)

    by PovRayMan ( 31900 )
    Well I did my part of showing off Mozilla by starting with my Dad...

    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)

    by Grip3n ( 470031 )
    Personally I'm finding Andreessen to be very pessimistic and trollish in vision. This is the man that once had a very ambitious vision, but it looks like the failure of his company against the Goliath of all companies has quelled his visionary persona just a tad.

    "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)

    by savaget ( 26702 ) on Saturday June 15, 2002 @08:35AM (#3707234)
    One way to gain market share would be for a P2P Mozilla project(Sharezilla) to be started. Good file sharing software catches on quickly.

  • Andreessen not a neutral observer! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by IGnatius T Foobar ( 4328 ) on Saturday June 15, 2002 @12:33PM (#3707895) Homepage Journal
    Let's keep something in mind here, folks: Marc Andreessen is not a neutral party when observing the next-generation browser war. The current Netscape is based on Mozilla -- it's no longer "his" Netscape. This, I think, is the same line of thinking that got JWZ so upset about the Mozilla project. Netscape, while employing people like Andreessen and Zawinski, produced a first-generation browser that swept across the market because it was the only one there, but quickly got taken down by a company with monopoly power in the desktop market. This time around, Netscape has a better browser than Microsoft, but it's not the one they helped build. Sounds like a recipe for sour grapes to me -- or at least an apathetic attitude.

    In the end, though, Microsoft didn't win the browser war -- open standards did.

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