Apparently Microsoft is going to drop Internet Explorer. The Wall St Journal; ran a long front page article lamenting this, flavored with a lot of IE users tears. What they did not mention was the history. Netscape Navigator was the first real web browser and Netscape was selling it for $30, It worked, and lots of people were sending in $30 to Netscape. Micro$oft woke up to the power of browsers and wrote Internet Explorer to compete with Netscape Navigator. Only Micro$oft included Internet Explorer as part of Windows, which made it free. This torpedoed Netscape’s business plan of selling Navigator for $30. They sued claiming unfair competition. The Federal Trade Commission dismissed Netscape’s suit.
Which was the end of Netscape as a company. Netscape Navigator was very good, and a bunch of computer savvy hackers maintained Navigator for many years. Navigator is still out there, it calls itself Firefox now. I still use it. According to figures I see on my blog, Firefox is still number three in popularity amount browsers. Micro$soft and Internal Explorer, and the follow on Edge are so far down they don’t even show.
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