zlacker

>>kjhugh+(OP)
I recently read Michael Lewis's "The New New Thing," which posits that Netscape was a get-rich-quick scheme by Jim Clark to fund a computer-navigated sailboat. He knew that Microsoft would render the company obsolete in six months, and bet that investors wouldn't glom on to that fact quickly enough. And boy was he right!

>>webwie+Bg
That would be consistent with the stories I heard about what hot garbage their Server Software was. The fact that it was where most of their money came from was problematic. It was not built to be a cash cow. I I do think that the free Netscape browser was the genesis of the free-app-with-strings-attached quagmire we are stuck in, but I can’t blame NS for that because one of the browsers Netscape was competing with, the one Spyglass employees seem to leave out of the Browser Wars rather conspicuously, was NCSA Mosaic. Which was developed under grants from the National Science Foundation and thus given away for the public good.

It’s hard to compete with free. And the NSF asked several times if they should still be funding it.

>>hinkle+Mp
> hot garbage their Server Software was

True. I created an online product catalog thing. For reasons I can't remember, I used SuiteSpot and JRunner.

Turrible. Absolutely turrible. Truly unforgivably bad.

Ditto their LDAP thing.

And Netscape sabotaged Java and Applets. And created JavaScript. And XUL. And...

But hey, marca famously named the image tag "img". So it wasn't all bad.

>>specia+Yz
> And Netscape sabotaged Java and Applets. And created JavaScript. And XUL.

So in that alternative universe we would likely have a non-responsive rectangle kind of UI that has to be loaded upfront. Despite all its shortcomings I much prefer the web, thank you very much.