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Comment by scarface_74 | Hacker News Reader

People look at Netscape through rose colored glasses. Netscape was a buggy piece of shit at its height. It was so bad that nerd wars happened on comp.sys.*.advocacy groups where people judged the robustness of an operating system based on how well it handled Netscape crashes and memory leaks.

Microsoft was worried that the browser would become the operating system and negate the important of the Windows API.

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> Netscape was a buggy piece of shit at its height.

Yes, it really was. But to their credit, they finally realized that they couldn't fix it, released the source, and set up Mozilla to run with it instead. And we got Firefox, which became the best browser at the time.

> Microsoft was worried that the browser would become the operating system

Thank god that never happened! Can you imagine how huge the browser would get? How limited apps would be? How much control the browser maker would have?

If not for mobile taking off, it almost happened.

Even today, with all the electron based apps and “full stack” Javascript developers, it’s hard to say Microsoft’s worries didn’t come to pass albeit with a twist …

Teams app on windows completes the full circle in my opinion.

> If not for mobile taking off, it almost happened.

It did happen, to a great degree. Much to our collective detriment, in my opinion.

It’s not really that the browser would be an OS, precisely, it’s that the browser would become the primary application API, replacing WIN32 for the most part. This could very well have happened, and to some extent, it did play out - except it doesn’t make sense for things like games, server software, local admin tools and so on… and then also, for some reason people like native mobile apps.

I used to run Netscape on a Sun workstation running Solaris, supposedly the pinnacle of late 90's Unix stability. It would segfault literally every half hour.

Of course my poor little Mac running System 7 didn’t stand a chance in all of its non memory protected, cooperative multitasking glory.

Same. It'd hose the whole X stack sometimes. That's how I learned about STOP+A.

Did you ever run Internet Explorer on Solaris?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_UNIX

I did try it once! It was a pig. Possibly the system I was running it on (Ultra 10, 256 megs RAM) was too under powered.

Cool.

Useless info:

As an untrained 'intern' I managed to install Solaris on an Ultra 10 that the company I was contracted to help somehow never managed. Later I got to keep it. Ditto a Sun Enterprise 450.

Neat! I worked at a big Sun shop for a while, one of my first jobs out of college. We had Ultra 5 and 10's on the desktop, E450's and E3500's for servers, various huge fiber channel attached storage arrays, etc. I really loved Sun hardware. Too bad they were absorbed by Oracle.

> Microsoft was worried that the browser would become the operating system and negate the important of the Windows API.

For context, Netscape themselves also claimed this would happen. Marc Andreesen famously said Netscape would “reduce Windows to a set of poorly debugged device drivers”.

> Marc Andreesen famously said Netscape would “reduce Windows to a set of poorly debugged device drivers”.

Thankfully it didn't quite end up like that... the drivers did eventually get fairly high quality;)

Never ask any CEO regarding their competitors, it just like asking a fox how to keep your chickens safe for the night.

Michael Dell is most likely regretting his infamous "I’d shut down Apple" quote.

Only the last point was the why.

The first point was that Netscape was horrible. If it had been better, people would have gone out of their way to download it.

When the first version of IE for the Mac was released, it was much better than Netscape and was considered the most CSS compliant.

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