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Comment by frabcus | Hacker News Reader

Of course we can!

It looked like Internet Explorer was a permanent browser monopoly just over a decade ago.

The Spread Firefox campaign - a crowd marketing campaign - fixed that. Combined, of course with a well made browser.

The result was that Apple and Google could later compete on another level with Microsoft (without Spread Firefox, websites wouldn't have worked on iPhones or Chrome).

Something similar can absolutely be done again.

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> The Spread Firefox campaign - a crowd marketing campaign - fixed that. Combined, of course with a well made browser.

Thanks, almost entirely, to Google's money.

Thanks, almost entirely, to Mozilla's efforts.

Yes, Mozilla gets most of its income from Google right now, but saying that Spread Firefox's success was almost entirely attributable to Google's money is tantamount to saying that Mozilla would've been unable to secure any other source of funding.

Google paid Mozilla for a service the latter rendered. It wasn't a donation.

It looked like Internet Explorer was a permanent browser monopoly just over a decade ago.

I remember noting it was odd in the late 90s that IE was free on computers (because they were all Windows...) yet half the people I knew paid money for this Netscape thing.

Am I crazy? I remember using Netscape myself and I'm sure I never paid for it.

"Netscape Navigator was not free to the general public until January 1998" - wikipedia

As others have mentioned, Netscape Navigator was free to individual users. Corporations using it were supposed to have site licenses, but in my experience this was mostly ignored en masse. I certainly worked at a couple of companies in that timeframe where everyone used Navigator at work but the company didn't have a corporate license and the situation was constantly joked about, the way people joke about WinZIP/WinRAR nag screens saying you are on day 1099 of your 30 day trial or whatever.

The archive.org provides the answer. For not even $50, Netscape Navigator is yours!

https://web.archive.org/web/19961115062838/http://merchant.n...

No, you're not crazy. Netscape Navigator was not free as such, but if I recall correctly, was free for individual users, schools, non-commercial entities, etc. (Am I mis-remembering this? The Wikipedia page doesn't have much detail.)

No, you're not crazy. It certainly became free. I just remember that there was a period when people were forking over actual money for a browser that wasn't IE.

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