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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

In the 90's, Microsoft proudly gave no money to politicians. Look what happened - an attack by the government on rather nebulous anti-trust charges. (Really - giving away a free browser harms consumers?)

This all stopped when Microsoft learned that when you're a big company, you'd better pay tribute (political contributions). The winning strategy is to contribute to both sides.

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> (Really - giving away a free browser harms consumers?)

Really, it does, and you were alive and on the internet at the time. You saw the rise of webpages that would only work on IE because it was bundled, you saw the demise of Netscape as a competitor because people wouldn't go through the motions of downloading another browser on a 28.8/56kbps connection.

Price dumping with extra steps is still price dumping.

As I remarked, I used Netscape first. I abandoned it for Explorer because Netscape crashed all the time, to the point of being unusuable.

Explorer was simply better.

whether iexplorer was better or not doesn't have anything to do with it being a subject of monopoly practises.

Of course it does. It is an explanation for why Explorer was preferred. Explorer was not forced on anybody.

All preventing that got us was a Chrome browser monopoly instead by a business whose overwhelmingly dominant source of revenue was internet advertising, oops. Talk about going from the frying pan into the fire. We'd probably have come out better off with the Internet Explorer monopoly.

At least Chrome will work on many different OSes, and [Chromium] is open-source so it can be compiled for anything. The problem with IE was that it forced everyone to buy and use Windows. If they had made it free and open-source so people could use it on any platform they wanted, it would have been fine.

>This all stopped when Microsoft learned that when you're a big company, you'd better pay tribute (political contributions). The winning strategy is to contribute to both sides.

Source? It seems equally plausible that it stopped because Microsoft won on appeal and the government got spooked and didn't want to prosecute a losing case.

> A losing case

And there you go. There was a picture just before that of Bill Gates riding on a golf cart with Bill Clinton. And then the case was dropped.

Things that make you go hmmmm....

It’s a good thing we only have two sides in America. Can you imagine if companies had to contribute to as many parties as Europeans have? No wonder we’re more competitive here.

When you're big, it's a cost of doing business.

you only need to contribute to the winning parties

Yes, really. By using their profits from other areas to drive Netscape out of business, consumers were harmed. This was shown in trial and Microsoft found to have violated antitrust laws.

No, nobody ever identified any "harm" at trial.

I started out using Netscape (amazingly, it wasn't any trouble getting and installing).

The "harm" I experienced was Netflix crashed constantly. So I tried Explorer. Explorer crashed about 90% less. That was the end of Netflix.

The horrible, dirty deed Microsoft did was write a better browser.

> The horrible, dirty deed Microsoft did was write a better browser.

No, the dirty deed was using their monopolist power to undercut another browser by bundling their offering with the OS.

Please, Walter, your takes are getting a tad way overboard with the anti-regulation stuff, you are stopping to think rationally to become an ideologue. You are smarter than that, at least by your technical achievements you should be.

I competed against Microsoft in the 1980s in the compiler business. Microsoft failed at defeating my tiny (in comparison) company (Zortech). Zortech did quite well against Microsoft C, despite everyone telling me that the next Microsoft release would put Zortech out of business.

Microsoft is one tough competitor. But I knew how to compete with them. I never had much sympathy for Netfix with their crummy (in comparison) browser.

Microsoft could have made their compiler free, and it wouldn't have made the difference. Lots of companies successfully competed with the free utilities Microsoft bundled with their operating system. They did it the old fashioned way - by making a better product, not a worse product.

BTW, did you know that the IBM PC came with a free BASIC compiler? That didn't even slow down competing languages.

And the Gnu stuff. All free. Doesn't that undermine competition? Isn't that so unfair? Why doesn't the DoJ go after Gnu for unfair trade?

The harms identified in the trial were reduced consumer choice, stifled innovation, exclusionary tactics, predatory pricing, and monopoly maintenance.

Except that none of those hold up under scrutiny.

Right, because post these events software didn't devolve to 'free software' that only costs 'all your privacy and personal information' as that is the only funding method able to compete with 'free'.

Did you mean to write Netscape instead of Netflix?

Oops! LOL

Yes giving a browser away harms consumers. It’s bundling and dumping to kill competitors.

I don't get it are operating systems and computers supposed to ship without web browsers? You could argue literally any feature is put into a product to 'bundle and dump' to kill competitors. Why is a web browser something that should be a paid product with a so called competitive market to begin with?

Windows also comes with USB drivers but hypothetically I could drive down to Best Buy and choose from a number of different USB drivers I would have to pay for separately (I guess I should pick up a web browser too apparently). This would be preferable why?

> I don't get it are operating systems and computers supposed to ship without web browsers? You could argue literally any feature is put into a product to 'bundle and dump' to kill competitors.

A browser was a separate product at the time, not a feature. Microsoft bundled, as they have done many other times, for anticompetitive reasons.

Cars today come bundled with stereos and navigators. Should they be charged?

only if the big car manufacturer made their own stereos/nagivators, and refused to do business with other vendors of such components in order to lock them out of the market.

Sounds like you think they should be charged.

Exactly. The whole case was simply an attack on Microsoft because Microsoft was a big target that (stupidly) dissed the DoJ.

It’s also worth noting at that time downloading an alternative browser probably over “dial up” was likely to take a couple of hours when you also had usage quotas and fees based on connection duration!

Fact check: firefox 1.0 (released in 2004) was only 5MB [1], which takes only 15 minutes to download on a 54 kb/s dial up connection[2]

[1] https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/1.0/win32/en-US...

[2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=6+MB+at+54kb%2Fs

That was the fastest a dial up modem could be, many modems were a fraction of that speed.

And this was Netscape, not Firefox, you need to go back about ten years further.

Edit: redoing the maths properly makes the 15 megabyte download in the late 90s take approximately:

- 45 minutes at 56.6kb modem

- 90 minutes at 28.8kb modem

- 180 minutes at 14.4kb modem

http://www.oldversion.com/windows/netscape/

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

> Microsoft released version 1.0 of Internet Explorer as a part of the Windows 95 Plus Pack add-on. According to former Spyglass developer Eric Sink, Internet Explorer was based not on NCSA Mosaic as commonly believed, but on a version of Mosaic developed at Spyglass[33] (which itself was based upon NCSA Mosaic).

> This period of time would become known as the browser wars. Netscape Navigator was not free to the general public until January 1998,[34] while Internet Explorer and Internet Information Server have always been free or came bundled with an operating system and/or other applications. Meanwhile, Netscape faced increasing criticism for "featuritis" – putting a higher priority on adding new features than on making their products work properly. Netscape experienced its first bad quarter at the end of 1997 and underwent a large round of layoffs in January 1998.

Overall, lots of good points in your post. However, this one:

    > Netscape Navigator was not free to the general public until January 1998

I am really dating myself here! I remember using Netscape pre-1998, and there is no way that I paid for it -- I was a broke uni student. (And, I don't think that I pirated it either.) Was I always using a (free) beta version? I cannot remember all of the details.

>And this was Netscape, not Firefox, you need to go back about ten years further.

Software tends to get bigger as time goes on, not smaller. Therefore the size of firefox in 2004 should be an upper bound for a browser back in the 90s.

Keep in mind that Netscape "Communicator" 4 wasn't just a browser. It was a browser, an email client, an NNTP client, an HTML editor, etc. Firefox was a fork that stripped all that junk out and made it lean and mean again.

http://www.oldversion.com/windows/netscape/

It seems like by the late 90s the Netscape installer was already around 15 megabytes.

Netscape went on first to become Mozilla (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Application_Suite), but it was a big and bloated; and only then came Firefox as a slimmed down Mozilla only for web browsing.

Yeah, and the important detail here is all of this happened years after the "browser wars", which saw Netscape rapidly free-fall from being worth billions to being discontinued once IE was bundled with Windows 95. And then years later, Mozilla built Firefox from what remained.

Or you could get it on a CD.

Consumers at the time had other browsers they could install and use. There was no impediment to it.

"Rather nebulous"? What's nebulous about leveraging your position on the market to drown out competitors with a free browser bundled with your operating system?

If Amazon redirected all search results of a product to their own version of it, omitting all others - would that be nebulous as well?

The real reason Netscape failed was their browser stunk. I know because I used both of them. Netscape crashed constantly. Explorer crashed too, but not nearly as often.

That's why people switched to Explorer. Netscape ran crying to the government.

That whole shtick about Explorer being uninstallable was ludicrous and irrelevant. Nothing stopped a user from installing another browser and using it. These days, a free browser is included with about every device.

Non-technical users leave defaults on all the time - do you really think there wasn't a sense in some people IE _was_ the internet? Don't you think MS wanted it that way? The "Connect to the Internet" icon on Windows 98's desktop had the IE icon on it!

And this wasn't "these days" when "a free browser is included with every device", it was 1998.

I think you're being dense on purpose.

Microsoft included a number of utilities with its operating system - like a text editor - that operating systems have included since the beginning. There's no magic line that says a browser cannot be included.

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