zlacker

Mozilla is dead as a doornail. Google succeeded where Microsoft did not, they essentially control the entire web now.

>>ascend+(OP)
> Google succeeded where Microsoft did not

Microsoft wasn't trying to control the web; they were trying to hobble it so that everyone kept on developing for win32. In retrospect, not a great strategy, but many companies try to kick the can down the road, and it often works, so I can't fault them too much.

>>nordsi+42
Eh-- I think that 2-3 years of breathing room they bought-- and killing Netscape's "the browser is the operating system" dreams-- was probably worthwhile from their point of view.

>>ascend+(OP)
Yep, Firefox should have allowed styling their scrollbars. Nobody wants those ugly ass scrollbars in their apps.

>>ascend+(OP)
San Francisco salaries and the removal of Brendan Eich is what happened to Mozilla not Google and Microsoft.

>>nordsi+42
Of course large companies are always a bit schizophrenic with different departments moving in different directions, but I think fundamentally 1995-2000's Microsoft was trying to improve the web, and get people to use it. Just as Google does now they tried to blur the line between desktop and web, just that where Google is trying to move all desktop functionality to the web interface, Microsoft was trying to make all web functionality accessible in a desktop interface.

Explorer and Internet Explorer were deeply married, with the ability to set web pages as desktop background, the Explorer of Windows 98 having a "sidebar" that was an HTML page, the ubiquitous help format being compressed HTML pages with index and search, ActiveX giving webpages desktop-application-like powers, JScript being a powerful javascript-compatible automation language for Windows. Windows was full of web technologies in the dot-com era, many bringing web and desktop closer together. This stopped an reversed course in the early 2000s. You could now say that's classic embrace-extend-extinguish, but the collapse of the dot-com bubble explains explains the sudden lack of investment and increasing distance between desktop and web just as well.

>>redavn+3a
They get paid half a billion a year from Google, so thanks to Google things are like this. There's no incentive whatsoever to beat who pays them.

>>slig+au
There's an active incentive NOT to disrupt that relationship.

>>redavn+3a
Firefox's market share was in freefall long before Brendan Eich left.