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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

Netscape went out of business because their browser crashed far more frequently than Explorer. I've heard all the sob stories, but I was sick of the constant crashing of Netscape, and so tried Explorer. Explorer crashed too, but not nearly as often.

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Hmm, I worked at a large company in 1995 as a web dev, and they were paying a license fee "per copy" of Netscape Navigator. I distinctly remember this, because we had 10,000 licenses. But we did get phone support with that, and I talked to Netscape's help desk a few times with various issues I faced as a developer.

Commercial users were paying for Netscape in 1995. It was only free for personal use. Even articles from 1996 mention the cost of Netscape as $49. [1]

So at least part of the reason IE displaced Netscape was that it was free for enterprises. And Netscape was not, until it was too late.

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/27743/nothing-netscape

FWIW, Netscape got bought out by AOL, but not before it spun off Mozilla. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape

It may be hard to believe, but the first iteration of Internet Explorer on Macintosh (back on System 8) was __solid__. IE, at least on PowerMacs, was way faster and more reliable than either NCSA Mosaic or Navigator.

Hell, AOL still runs Netscape as a discount ISP, same logo since 1999 and everything: https://isp.netscape.com

God that's a beautiful website. Loads fast. Not too many graphics. Nothing moves unless I tell it to.

> Netscape got bought out by AOL

That makes it sound like Netscape had no say in the matter. Netscape sold itself to AOL.

"Bought out" is a common enough way to describe any company sale. "Sold itself" introduces way more unnecessary sub-textual baggage just by being a more unusual construction.

Microsoft had FrontPage create pages that crashed Netscape.

Netscape produced a browser that could be crashed by a malformed page.

> Explorer crashed too, but not nearly as often.

Netscape crashing on a web page is Netscape's fault.

Similarly, if the D compiler crashes when compiling a D source file, it's the D core team's fault.

If the people that make the OS whose APIs you are reliant on, are also the ones trying to make your code crash, I'd bet most of us would end up with crashing code.

I've never heard of any evidence that Microsoft planted:

    if (NetscapeIsRunning()) corrupt_data();

in their OS API calls. If they had, I'm sure it would have come out at the anti-trust trial, and would have made it an open and shut case. Did that happen?

As I recall, the anti-trust case revolved around Microsoft including IE for free with Windows, not sabotage. (Of course, every OS comes with a free browser these days. Even my Kindle.)

The claim by tinus_hn is that FrontPage - Microsoft's HTML editing tool - created pages that crash Netscape.

While it would arguably be Netscape's fault if Netscape actually crashes (rather than simply failing to display a malformed input) at that time in the browser wars there were plenty of energy going into creating incompatible new 'features' - such as Microsoft's own JavaScript competitor, VBScript [1], vector imaging format (AutoShapes) and animation tags (DHTML)

And Microsoft did intentionally sabotage competitors products in the 1990s with approval from the highest levels of the business - such as DR-DOS [2].

So while I'm not aware of any claims Microsoft sabotaged the OS to make Netscape crash, they'd sabotaged the OS to make other competing products crash, and they certainly added a lot of 'features' so web pages wouldn't render right on Netscape.

[1] http://www.gbengasesan.com/fyp/43/ch5.htm [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code

I know about the AARD episode, and Microsoft lost a lawsuit over it, which was the right result.

There's zero evidence Microsoft sabotaged Netflix.

There's zero evidence Netscape crashed for any reason other than buggy Netflix code. Making a web page that crashes Netflix is a bug in Netflix. Microsoft is under zero obligation to work around Netflix bugs.

Netscape was not selling their browser so that did not matter. I worked at a startup that used their server. We wanted to pay for it but they would not invoice us. Just sending money without an invoice would have been a donation. I sat for hours on their customer support line trying to get an invoice but they never sent one until they went out of business.

I worked on Netscape Enterprise Server it had JavaScript as the scripting language. Did you work on that? Before NodeJS....

They absolutely did sell their browser to enterprises. It was only free for personal use.

I think that’s what cloudwizard is saying. They knew that Netscape cost money for professional use, but in trying to get an invoice to actually pay for it, Netscape did nothing.

I worked at a company in 1994 that had 10,000 licenses to Netscape Navigator. I had a support person I could call. So on some scale, there was definitely a way to send them money.

Yup, I can clearly remember Netscape crashing very very often. It was definitely the worse browser.

Exactly this. There's a lot of historic revision that says IE was never good, but there was a significant chunk of time around IE2 and IE3 where it slaughtered Netscape on Windows. Better performance, less crashing all around.

IE4 is where ActiveX and browser bloat started to become more obvious, then IE5 was an improvement again.. but we were only a short time from the launch of what would become Firefox. By that point, people were tired of the constant IE issues.

At some point, I was using IE 5, then IE 5.5, then Opera and then Firefox 0.8! Used some Neoplanet as well, but I cannot remember when anymore, must have been before Opera... IE 5.5 was great at the time, though mouse gestures and tabs on Opera were better.

Bingo and I distinctly remember when IE's CSS support was significantly better than Netscape's at a crucial point in time when it really mattered to nascent Web design and development.

Explorer also launched a lot faster than especially the late versions of netscape.

Yep. Netscape crashed at least every 30 minutes.

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