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Comment by blackeyeblitzar | Hacker News Reader

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?

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

> 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.

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.

>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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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