1997: Netscape Crossware vs. the Windows Web

ActiveX was one of the primary reasons that so many enterprise web based apps couldn't be used other browsers. Enterprises were all Microsoft and ActiveX was used to do things like get to the user's active directory profile.

So while Internet Explorer was getting passed, corporate users were stuck on websites that required a proprietary plugin to use.

This was still a problem at a company I worked at four years ago. Our customers were large corporations that had standardized on Internet Explorer over a decade prior and were unwilling to change anything because they had built so much on that platform. Some didn't even care that Microsoft had end-of-life'd it.

Really interesting read!

I had no idea Netscape released a Javascript-based Visual Basic clone.

My understanding is that this and many other codebases that Sun acquired (Forte/4GL, for instance) ultimately ended up merged into what is today NetBeans - itself a Sun acquisition.

My life as a web developer at that time revolved around navigating the differences between Netscape and IE, which were the two browsers my company's product supported at the time. It was a painful life.