Web browser market share of all times visualized
figurepool.com
figurepool.com
I can remember Jim Barksdale, (A southern gentleman, and our beloved CEO) - frequently made references to William Barksdale (Confederate General) - and urged Netscape on to fight, always reminding us, that win or lose, we'd never forget that we fought in the browser wars.
This web page of browser growth history (for all it's probable flaws) is very heartwarming.
It would be far better to do line plots of each browser's market share as a function of time, distinguishing different browsers by color.
After which amount of data points is it considered recommended to switch to interpolated line/area charts?
browser share wise, yes, 2012 really is/was the greatest year ever.
This? http://www.quora.com/Who-is-most-likely-to-acquire-Mozillas-...
[Update & disclaimer: The page links to a question on Quora which is behind a sign-up overlay for non-users by Quora. I do not work for Quora.]
The question regarding browser market-share and its impact on Microsoft's positioning is relevant to the context of this thread so it makes sense to quote here.
It may be hard for people to imagine now, but back in 1996/1997, selling browser software was like selling spreadsheet or word processing software. People paid $50+/copy for their browser. It was a threat to Microsoft (potential alternative application platform) - so they eliminated it (Cut off Netscape's Air supply) - by giving the browser away for free with their operating system - and, because everyone (for most reasonable definitions of everyone) was running Microsoft's operating system on their desktop, there was no longer any need to buy it from Netscape.
It probably didn't help that, by 1998, the Netscape client had a pretty significant technical debt, was no longer a nimble browser, and, if I recall correctly, had been rebranded as "Netscape Communicator" and had all this crufty email/calendar/editing software slapped onto it. If all you wanted was a browser, Netscape was not necessarily the goto product anymore. Even simple things like rendering large tables could freeze up the browser. And it crashed. A lot.
This was before people realized how valuable controlling the search engine/first hop to the Internet would be.
Netscape (Mike Homer?) finally realized that, with it's dying breath, the most valuable asset it had wasn't all the Enterprise Software (Directory Servers, Certificate Servers, Enterprise Web Server, Application Servers, Business Servers) - but, Ironically, "www.netscape.com" - sold to AOL for $4Billion (much of the software being split between AOL and Sun in the ill fated iPlanet experiment) - and, on the last day of trading, was worth $10 Billion (mostly due to to a rise in the stock value of AOL - the deal's value was heavily related to the AOL stock price)
What do you think Microsoft has now? Microsoft isn't quite as lethal at this time, but in all honesty, they still dominate. It's funny to see people complain about Google's 70% search monopoly and Apple's 20-25% iOS walled garden, but 9/10 of the people in the world buy PC's with Microsoft Windows.
Also, web applications provide real diversity of application experience beyond the Windows OS. For a lot of people, applications like email, twitter, photo-sharing, game playing, social networking etc.. are no longer tied to a particular desktop client operating system. Indeed, Social Networking, where people spend enormous amounts of time, is an example where I would say the Desktop OS is as irrelevant as your BIOS.
First they ignore you....
The reality is about a quarter of global computer sales are Macs, iPads or Android tablets and all those categories are growing rapidly. If you include smartphones in the equation, as some aggressively pro-mobile (but not necessarily wrong) observers do, Microsoft already has a minority platform share.
The sales numbers of the retail boxes for both from CompUSA, Egghead, Computer City, and so on reflected this. IE was massively outselling Netscape. Sure, when bundling came alone later, it didn't help Netscape, but I think by that point they were already past the tipping point.
But this stopped precisely in early 1998. Such a major gain for IE from 1997 to 1998 (or before) would have made more sense based on this aspect.
And, unlike today, where an alternative browser is just a click-away on a high speed link for even the average layperson, the vast majority of the world back then (geeks not included) got their browser through the channel that delivered software to them - and, for most computers users, the operating system was the ultimate channel. Downloading something as huge as an entire browser was not likely undertaken. Your average user had something like a 56 Kilobit modem back in 1998.
So, when the IE browser was free, and bundled through every-channel Microsoft could get their hands on - it was the end of times. Entire buildings on East Middlefield road, Mountain View associated with the consumer/business sales of Netscape Communicator/Navigator were shuttered. The layoffs were apocalyptic.
I'll give it to Microsoft, they certainly cut off Netscape's air supply. Of course, as a result of their actions, The United States Government decided they had violated elements of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 - in particular tying, and that resulted in a decade of oversight that may have done them more harm than Netscape ever would have.
And that in turn lead to further addinng fuel to the internet by lowering the barrier to entry for users leading to a feedback loop. $50+ was more than a months salary in many countries.
I am sure many divisions in RIM and Nokia were cut because of Google "dumping" Android for free by leveraging profits from their search(not to mention bundling Chrome with Flash and Java updates leading to the charts in the article). But Android does lead to more people accessing the internet through smartphones and that is a huge net gain to all of us regardless of a few companies getting hurt short term.
Also, the issue wasn't, "Free", or "Leveraging profits", it was "Tying", which, in certain cases when you are a monopoly, turns out to be problematic when one is trying to maintain the appearance of a competitive marketplace.
The US Government wasn't there to protect the companies, it was there to protect customers. I, for one, am happy that Microsoft wasn't given free reign to do anything it wanted after it had established a monopoly position on the desktop.
Likewise, if Apple is ever able to achieve 90%+ market share on mobile, many of their practices today (such as giving their own developers preferential access to private APIs, or being able to run outside of a sandbox) should be reigned in.
Then came Netscape 4.0 and IE 4.0. This was were Netscape failed horribly.
Netscape 4.0 Communicator was slow and buggy and crashed often. When Netscape 4.0 Navigator crashed, it brought down the entire suite (Email client, Web Composer) along with it.
IE 4.0 on the other hand was really slick, stable and cool. It loaded up faster and rendered the pages faster (bear in mind those were the days of dialup).
It didn't matter that IE 4.0 was bundled into the OS. I was using Win 95 and I downloaded and installed IE 4.0 because I loved it.
To me, it wasn't the bundling of IE 4.0 into the OS that killed Netscape, it was just that Netscape 4.0 sucked compared to IE 4.0
After IE 4.0, I discovered Opera and have been using it since.
Then Microsoft introduced Windows 98 with IE in it, and killed that Netscape market.
There was no "Mosaic" left to be Mosaic after that.
And that's a good thing. It would be best if it's never "over", because the only way for that to happen would be complete and unchangeable dominance of one browser, which would cause exactly the problems we don't want.