In WTF, Tim O’Reilly writes,
Netscape, built to commercialize the web browser, had decided to provide the source code to its browser as a free software project using the name Mozilla. Under competitive pressure from Microsoft, which had built a browser of its own and had given it away for free (but without source code) in order to “cut off Netscape’s air supply,” Netscape had no choice but to go back to the web’s free software roots.
This is such an attractive myth that it just won’t die. I have been complaining about it for many years now.
The reality is that Netscape just could not build reliable software. I know from bitter personal experience that their web servers, which were supposed to be the main revenue source for the company, did not work. And indeed Netscape never used its server to run its own web site. They never “ate their own dog food,” in tech parlance.
On the browser side, Netscape had a keen sense of what new features would enhance the Web as an interactive environment. They came up with “cookies,” so that when you visit a web site it can leave a trace of itself on your computer for later reference when you return. They came up with JavaScript, a much-maligned but ingenious tool for making web pages more powerful.
But Netscape’s feature-creation strategy backfired because they couldn’t write decent code. Things played out this way.
1. Netscape would introduce a feature in to the web browser.
2. An Internet standards committee would bless the feature, declaring it a standard.
3. Microsoft would make Internet Explorer standards-compliant, so that the feature would work.
4. The feature would fail to work on the Netscape browser.
In short, Netscape kept launching standards battles and Microsoft kept winning them, not by obstructing Netscape’s proposed standards but by implementing them. Netscape’s software development was too incompetent to write a browser that would comply with its own proposed standards.
I’m sure that if Netscape could have developed software corporately they would have done so. But because they could not manage software development internally, they just gave up and handed the browser project over to the open source community. And need I add that the most popular browser is not the open source Mozilla but the proprietary Chrome.
Here is one of my favorite old essays on the Microsoft-Netscape battle.
Great reminder! I had forgotten what a frustrating crash-happy hog Netscape’s browser was. IE was indeed vastly superior.
Although Javascript has taken over the world, it’s still a hot mess. Interestingly, Microsoft has fixed that too with their Typescript language. Just as C# is Java done right, Typescript is Javascript done right.
On the other hand, almost all of Chrome is open-sourced as Chromium. I think the story of Mozilla says a lot more about Netscape’s failures as a firm than it does about open source software.
Don’t duopolies function very similarly as monopolies?
What changes in regulation would you suggest given that many of the technologies we use are naturally concentrated into one or a few players?
“Microsoft would make Internet Explorer standards-compliant, so that the feature would work.”
Was with you right up until this. IE was never standards compliant, and in fact was deliberately so back then. Even today, the hardest thing about web development is the fact that you have to take IE into consideration.
It wasn’t so much that it wasn’t standards compliant, as that it supported things that went beyond the standards, or things like ActiveX that were Microsoft specific technologies. Then the web pages served up tended to not be standards compliant and only work in IE.
Back in 1997, a company contracted with me to write a web browser for their hardware, complete with Javascript. At one point, I had a test page that crashed every browser I tried it on. And others that formatted completely differently depending on the browser.
It really was a mess.
The dominant web server since 1995 or so has been Apache Web Server (httpd). Rob McCool created that and worked the Netscape Enterprise Server, which was actually pretty widely used because of its security support.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_McCool
Netscape Navigator failed for a different reason than you suggest.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/
Chrome is open source (Chromium) and the dominant browser.
I believe I was doing web development around roughly the same time you were, Arnold, and I had a very different experience. Especially as XHTML and CSS came onto the scene, Mozilla browsers were always considerably easier to develop for because they were much more standards compliant than IE, which required all kinds of weird hacks to get to work. It was awful when a client would say, “We need this look identical in IE6.”
And was Netscape developed by the open source community? Or did Netscape release the source code to that community? I thought it was the latter, in which case that’s what Chrome does with Chromium and Safari does with WebKit.
But, generally, I think a lot of web developers at the time would be very surprised to hear hear that “Netscape kept launching standards battles and Microsoft kept winning them.”
Not with you on this one… while I can’t speak to Netscape’s servers, and there was a brief time where IE 3/4 was adopting features faster than Netscape… adhering to standards was not IE’s strong suit.
IE was the primary start of the famous MS policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish — which is why it is curious to claim that Microsoft won the standards wars honorably.
Also, whatever their implementation of web standards rapidly deteriorated, the primary nightmare of web developers like myself for the longest time was IE5/6 and its terrible implementation of the CSS box model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_box_model_bug
It took what felt like the better part of a decade to finally reach IE 9/10 where they were somewhat on par with the other browser vendors as they let their Trident renderer languish horribly for years.
Netscape certainly failed in many ways, but long term Microsoft certainly was no friend to web standards, particularly the way they tried to inject ActiveX into everything and create a Flash clone in Silverlight (all of these are largely dead web technologies)
Chrome is also not proprietary. The browser shell may be, but Chromium (as well as Apple’s WebKit and Mozilla’s various renderers) is fully open source and the core of a lot of software ecosystems like Microsoft’s own Visual Studio Code editor.