If Netscape had won the browser war?

[Eggcorn]

As many of you know: Internet Explorer and Netscape were the two main browsers fighting for dominance in the 1990s. IE won that war, and gained a near-monopoly for a while. And that led to trouble! IE was a security nightmare. Websites were designed to only work with IE. IE used underhanded tactics to keep her near-monopoly, becoming an enemy of a free and open Internet. Etc.

But what if Netscape had won that war? How would that have changed Internet history, and the experience of the Internet's users?

[LonM]

@Eggcorn I suspect mozilla, opera et al would have still made their own engines which would lead to push web standards forwards, and chrome would have jumped in at a later date and allowed google to take over everything.

We would however have been able to avoid everything to do with activeX, no-one would have to deal with IE which, due to being tied with the operating system, forced developers to cater to older versions far longer than was needed.

I'm not sure what kinds of dramatic changes this could have lead to. My suspicion is we would probably have ended up in the same place, if maybe a little sooner.

[Eggcorn]

@LonM said in If Netscape had won the browser war?:

I suspect mozilla, opera et al would have still made their own engines

Didn't (pre-Chromium) Opera always have her own layout engine?

[TbGbe]

@Eggcorn If Netscape "won"; we'd have missed out on Opera Bork !!

[kahukura]

@TbGbe I always liked the subtle humor Devs put in their releases.

[Priest72]

I still have seamonkey on my computer and it is a fine browser except a huge memory issue with facebook,
Seamonkey is the only living descendent of the netscape navigator.

seamonkey has never received enough love and always gets dismissed and put on the heap of browsers past..
crying shame....

[Eggcorn]

@LonM said in If Netscape had won the browser war?:

I suspect mozilla, opera et al would have still made their own engines which would lead to push web standards forwards, and chrome would have jumped in at a later date and allowed google to take over everything.

Opera's been around since 1996, but would Mozilla and Chrome have existed if Netscape won the browser war? Mozilla/Firefox is an open-source spin-off of Netscape, I think Netcape's fall is a big part of the reason that happened. And Chrome: I think part of the reason Chrome was created, is that Google got tired of trying to get her web services to work on IE.

[LonM]

@Eggcorn I am pretty sure the drive for open development would have given us at least 1 other open source browser. And, if not chrome, I'm pretty sure Google would have their own browser anyway - they like to have a finger in every pie.

[Eggcorn]

@LonM Well I would hope so! Imagine if there were no open-source browser, and Opera still removed nearly all of her features after version 12. Creating Vivaldi would have been a lot more difficult, without that open-source code to use as a starting point.

[Eggcorn]

@Eggcorn I'll try to answer my own question. But mind you, I'm not too familiar with Netscape. I didn't use it much (or at least, I don't remember using it much). I don't know how ethical Netscape was as a company.

That said: I sure wouldn't be surprised if Netscape had pulled some of the stunts that IE did, and abused her monopoly position. If Netscape had, say, refused to follow standards, so that websites would work only in Netscape and not in alterative browsers. If the Netscape company had encouraged websites to use browser-sniffing to block alterative browsers. Etc.

But there's a fundamental diffidence between Netscape and IE: IE was owned by Microsoft, and integrated into Windows. Microsoft wanted to lock people into using IE, and using Windows. Netscape's mission was just the opposite, to reduce Windows to being (Marc Andreessen's own words) "a poorly debugged set of device drivers" As I understand it: Netscape's aim was to being about an era of web applanations. Meaning that it wouldn't matter much what you're operating system was, because you'd do your computer work in the browser.

That's largely the world we have today, a world a web applanations. But perhaps we'd have had it sooner, if Netscape had won.

[Streptococcus]

@Eggcorn
What the article did not mention was that Netscape actually went to court over the bundling of IE in Windows, stating that it was unfair competition, since IE was free and Netscape was sold.
They won their case, so Microsoft made IE part of the shell, so could argue that it could not be removed, since a computer with no shell is useless.

[dbouley]

@priest72 I'm still a SeaMonkey user as well. I give Vivaldi a try when ever there's an update (but I guess those days are over, since they seem to be dropping 32bit architectures). But Vivaldi, like all other Chromium based browsers, just suck up too much of my system resources. In short order (a day at the most) of browsing, my system grinds to a halt.

I haven't found anything as flexible, robust and efficient as SeaMonkey. The only problem I have with it has to do with lazy web developers refusing to code for anything other than Chrome.

[RiveDroite]

@lonm I don't think Firefox would exist today if Netscape had won considering that it's pretty much the continuation of Netscape in a way.