<
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/04/the-world-of-web-browsers-is-in-a-bad-way/>
"There once was a man who invented a means for publishing scientific documents
using hypertext. He made his first documents available from his NeXT cube, and
a lot of the academics who saw them thought it was a great idea. They took the
idea, expanded it, and added graphics, and pretty soon people who weren’t
scientists wanted to use it too. It became the Next Big Thing, and technology
companies new and old wanted a piece of the pie.
You all know the next chapter of this story. It’s the mid 1990s, and Microsoft,
having been caught on the back foot after pursuing The Microsoft Network as a
Compuserve and AOL competitor, did an about-turn and set out to conquer the
Web. Their tool of choice was Microsoft Internet Explorer 3, which since it
shipped with Windows 95 and every computer that mattered back then came with
Windows 95, promptly entered a huge battle with Netscape’s Navigator browser.
Web standards were in their infancy so the two browsers battled each other by
manipulating the underlying technologies on which the Web relied. Microsoft
used their “Embrace and extend” strategy to try to Redmondify everything, and
Netscape got lost in the wilderness with Netscape 4, a browser on which
nightmarish quirks were the norm. By the millennium it was Internet Explorer
that had won the battle, and though some of the more proprietary Microsoft web
technologies had fallen by the wayside, we entered the new decade in a relative
monoculture."
Via Rixty Dixet.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
