Hacker News Reader

Comment by brudgers | Hacker News Reader

"The most popular alternatives to Firefox are Google's Chrome and Microsoft's Internet Explorer. I doubt these alternative browsers would exist if they were not useful for Google's and Microsofts main businesses."

The generic argument is empty. Firefox is good for Mozilla's business. Same for Opera.

The business cases for IE and Chrome are significantly different. Distributing IE with Windows benefits users for the same reasons that Ubuntu Linix distros ship with Firefox - they providing a rational and reasonable path from the act of stuffing an install disk into a drive to the point where the user is surfing the internet and possibly completing the installation. IE allows windows to be used right out of the box.

It's hard to make that sort of case for Chrome - but easy for Safari. Chrome was primaily developed to improve Google's data mining and reduce search server loads by collecting keystokes from the address bar.

View on HN

>It's hard to make that sort of case for Chrome - but easy for Safari. Chrome was primaily developed to improve Google's data mining and reduce search server loads by collecting keystokes from the address bar.

This statement is not just technically ignorant; it's downright absurd. More than probably any company, Google lives and dies by the web as a platform. Chrome is Google's best way to influence and improve that platform. It's why Google previously had a team of mostly former Mozilla/Netscape employees contributing fulltime to Firefox (including one of the original creators of Firefox), and why that team eventually chose to create Chrome. When the web is so essential to your business, it only makes sense to invest heavily in its improvement, and ensure you have a say in its trajectory.

This is a fair argument, but "improving the web as a platform" doesn't necessarily equal "good for the web". If a local developer (I mean a land developer here) runs for city council because he believes in his city and wants to improve it for the good of his business, it's still quite possible that the decisions he makes could be bad for the city as a whole in the long run (i.e. favoring parts of town he develops over others for services, businesses, etc.).

I'm not saying Chrome is a data-mining tool (though I don't doubt that it could be doing some of that), but it's also not a purely altruistic contribution to the community. Google is the big developer that's doing lots of beautification and really contributing to the growth of the city, but Firefox is the community activist that's trying to make sure all the developers play by the rules that benefit everyone, not just them.

Google lives and die by its ability to deliver eyeballs and credit cards to advertisers, nothing else. Never forget that. That they want to "help the web" or "help the internet" is only a strategic play to help their primary objective.

Ding!

Chrome is Google's best way to influence and improve that platform

You mean by pushing Google Mail, search, docs and other Google properties.

The business case for IE is to hold back the progress of the web, so that it doesn't threaten Microsoft's main profit centers.

That is patent nonsense. The web grew because Windows users were able to browse it with IE in the days before Netscape and when the second choice was going with *nix and Mosaic. IE killed Gopher by taking browsing to the masses.

Netscape was a startup and its founder had a Fuck You Money exit before it met its fate as a corporate subsidiary managed across a continent. The legacy of IE6 lives with us because of suboptimal architectural decisions by web developers. Yet, the web is escaping it - unlike the warts of JavaScript.

>That is patent nonsense. The web grew because Windows users were able to browse it with IE in the days before Netscape and when the second choice was going with *nix and Mosaic.

There were no IE days before Netscape. Netscape came first, and IE was originally just a defensive response. That's not to deny that there was a period where IE was arguably a superior browser, but IE simply would not have have been created were it not for Netscape becoming the first mainstream browser.

What evidence do you have that Microsoft would not have created a web browser but for Netscape? Or rather licensed one, because that's what they did when they could not purchase Booklink.

Had Microsoft not shipped a browser with Windows, browsers would have remained obscure shareware like Netscape Navigator and AOL or Compuserve would have been the standard online experience of most people for much longer.

From Bill Gates's "Internet Tidal Wave" internal memo:

"A new competitor "born" on the Internet is Netscape. Their browser is dominant, with 70% usage share, allowing them to determine which network extensions will catch on. They are pursuing a multi-platform strategy where they move the key API into the client to commoditize the underlying operating system. They have attracted a number of public network operators to use their platform to offer information and directory services. We have to match and beat their offerings including working with MCI, newspapers, and other who are considering their products."

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2011/07/internet-tidal-wave.htm...

He seems to view it as a most serious threat. I think if he thought it would remain non-threatening they would never have made a browser.

The past is never dead, and so we shovel it full of the present when we talk about it.

70% of browser usage was probably less than 1,000,000 browsers in 1994 and those primarily in large commercial and educational settings. The consumer internet didn't exist because the web wasn't viable at 9600 baud (2738 websites of which 370 were .com in June '94).

http://www.mit.edu/~mkgray/net/web-growth-summary.html

It's obvious that once Microsoft got serious about the web, they quickly moved beyond MCI and newspapers of the memo to a vision of browsers "on every desk and in every home."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSjfmme4hpM

The scale at which Microsoft distributed browsers made the web commercially viable in the way we know it today. It's easy to forget that Netscape was bundled with AOL - keyword: walled garden.

I seriously doubt IE did much for the adoption of the world wide web. By the time IE made a dent, WWW was already a huge success and obviously growing rapidly. Being (eventually) pervasive it almost certainly introduced some people to the internet, but if it hadn't been MS it would have been someone else.

I bet the adoption was faster that it would have been if microsoft hadn't integrated IE. Of course, if microsoft hadn't integrated IE it's quite possible company would have died by now (or been a footnote of desktop computing history - like IBM). They didn't really have much of a choice.

"IE in the days before Netscape"?

From a practical perspective, yes.

IE bootstrapped access to Navigator for the general population of computer users. People got Navigator using IE to download it from Netscape's website - just like they get Chrome, Firefox, and Opera today.

Until IE shipped with Windows, the only way a typical user was going to get Netscape was on a floppy disk via the shareware community or perhaps from a BBS. It wasn't being downloaded through AOL or Compuserve and if it was, what would one have done with it August 1995?

It would be naive to ignore Netscape's IPO occurred one week before IE 1.0.

"The first version of Internet Explorer (later referred to as Internet Explorer 1) made its debut on 16 August 1995."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer

"0.4 Netscape September 9, 1994 First public beta release" "1.0 Netscape December 15, 1994 First non-beta release"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_%28web_browser%29

Hanlon's Razor applies here: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

You're telling me IE's devs were so stupid they couldn't add a spell-checker until IE10?

Is that really more believable than internal corporate interests deciding that it threatened Word?

Stupidity isn't about the individual developers -- it's about the incompetent decisions that Microsoft made about the browser. They decided that IE would be released only in-sync with new Windows releases. Vista troubles meant IE was effectively on hiatus between 2001 (IE6) and 2006 (IE7). Corporate interests were definitely keeping IE development back, but not as an intentional defensive move to sabotage the Web. Lack of competition in browsers during that period served as a pretty good demotivator, too.

"One thing we have got to change in our strategy - allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company. We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities."

-- Bill Gates, 1998 a memo to the Office product group[2]

Seems like the guy in charge knew when to actively "stop putting effort into" things and intentionally sabotage the open web when necessary.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Gates

Ironically the reason I've tried my best to avoid MS Office is because they are not easily accessible by anyone. I once sent my CV as an HTML file along with a PDF. Still to this day, I prefer to send HTML and PDF over sending a Word document they only need an app that everybody uses, a browser.

What is more believable is that spell check in the browser is somewhat of an edge case relative to general browser usage (i.e. web consumption) which Microsoft was historically able to address by allowing plug-ins. They rolled it into the development of their plug-inless browser and rolled their plug-inless browser into their not quite so backward compatible OS release.

I suspect that the corporate interests have long known that IE is not a sales critical feature.

You're telling me that you actually believe that developers at Microsoft pick and choose what features they include in a browser?

You can blame software designers at Microsoft for that decision (or lack of decision), but I'm fairly sure that dev's at Microsoft are on the "fulfill the design" side of developing...

Maybe there's a data protection law in one American state that has nothing to do with the conversation that you would like to refer too?

bubble.....

What you're doing is "cyber-stalking", following me across threads and insulting me because a conversation did not end up like you want.

Please stop this immature behavior.

Just because they are stupid, does not mean they are not malicious.. in my experience the two are common bedfellows.

Though in this case I think maybe there is a third option.. ignorance maybe?

Agreed. I usually use the version of Hanlon's Razor that substitutes "incompetence" for "stupidity." Not that they didn't understand what was at stake, but made a series of bad decisions.

The business case for IE is to hold back the progress of the web, ...

Right? We would have had AJAX and DHTML so much sooner if it wasn't for Microsoft holding things back.

Haha, that's funny... because the XMLHttpRequest thing, the main enabler of Ajax, is actually a Microsoft invention,or, should I say: "Microsoft did it first.": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest#History_and_supp...

Who's making big bucks off Mozilla then? No employee or Mozilla higher-up is making more than average. On the other hand, I can name tons of Google, Microsoft, and Apple guys making billions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com