
Memoirs from the Browser Wars (2003) - luu
http://ericsink.com/Browser_Wars.html
======
smcl
This is a fascinating read, but this one line stuck out to me:

> Scott told me that the IE team had over 1,000 people

What on _earth_ could they possibly have had those thousand people doing?

~~~
chris_wot
They were basically trying to figure out how to "integrate" the browser into
Windows. But there were vast amounts of technology based around or that used
ActiveX - ADO, ASP, ASF, you name it - Microsoft created it. Besides that,
there were a lot of standards they were integrating.

~~~
scholia
At some points, Microsoft had two teams working on different versions of IE,
in order to leapfrog Netscape. The extra team developed the "componentized"
version where the browser was built from re-usable objects, where Netscape's
code was still a rambling mess. (This helped Microsoft win the AOL business:
it used IE even after it bought Netscape.)

The US DoJ's Janet Reno was a major factor. She forced Microsoft to sign a
Consent Decree (1995?) that prevented Microsoft from tying separate products
to Windows but allowed it to provide integrated improvements. The DoJ followed
up with an anti-trust suit (on Netscape's behalf) over browser tying.

Microsoft won the browser case by 2-1 on appeal. However, all this
bloodletting may have been a factor in Microsoft putting off the next browser,
which eventually appeared in Vista. Which was late, following the Longhorn
debacle, which prolonged XP's life, which enabled IE6 to get entrenched, which
caused web designers so much pain.

The world might be a better place if the DoJ hadn't interfered, but we'll
never know....

~~~
jordanlev
If you haven't already, you should definitely read "How Microsoft Lost The API
War"
([http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html))
by Joel Spolsky. One of my favorite articles of all time -- it speaks to some
of the things you raised... specifically how Microsoft intentionally let IE6
development come to a halt because it was no longer strategically beneficial
to them (not because the DoJ interference made them stop). Also hints at the
idea that the stability of IE6 for a while actually created a good environment
for innovation in the web app space to take place because things we're
changing all the time.

~~~
scholia
Great point, I'd missed that. Even though I'm a huge Spolsky fan, read the
whole website, bought the book, interviewed the man etc ;-)

Otherwise, I'd have picked his first Bill Gates review as one of my favorite
articles of all time...

------
rockdoe
_But Netscape was running at a much faster pace. They got ahead of us on
features and they began to give their browser away at no cost to end users.
This made Netscape the standard by which all other browsers were judged. If
our browser didn 't render something exactly like Netscape, it was considered
a bug. I hated fixing our browser to make it bug-compatible with Netscape even
though we had already coded it to "the standard". Life's not fair sometimes.
:-)_

Everyone who's not the current marketshare leader goes through this feeling.
And it's changed quite a few times.

 _I was stunned. That was 50 times the size of the Spyglass browser team. It
was almost as many people as Netscape had in their whole company. I could have
written the rest of the history of web browsers on that day -- no other
outcomes were possible....Looking back on the browser wars, Tim Krauskopf
remarked that we had beaten everybody who didn 't outspend us by a factor of
five. :-) _

Pretty much describes what Chrome did to the competition.

~~~
aakilfernandes
My view is that Chrome won because they provided the best developer tools, so
developers began building with Chrome in mind.

~~~
x0x0
and good timing -- chrome took off right as it became apparent how shitty
firefox had become (slow, crashy, memory pig -- and before you say anything,
that's w/ no plugins but flash and no flash running). I tried chrome, was
entranced by a browser that didn't suck, and quickly switched.

------
kalleboo
One thing I find curious is how in the early days right after NCSA Mosaic,
"Mosaic" became a generic term for browsers - We got Netscape Mosaic and
Spyglass Mosaic. NCSA quickly asserted their name, but it would be interesting
how we could have had an alternative universe where we were using Mosaic
Safari and Google Mosaic :)

------
frik
Internet Explorer up to version 6 contained a copyright note about containing
Spyglass Mosaic code in the about dialog. Obscure layout glitches and
behaviours from Mosaic were definitely in IE up to version 8 (e.g. mouse
pointer related code). Many things (UI, seperation of code into libraries,
API) of IE 11 trace back to IE 3.

------
acheron
There's a commonly repeated story that Microsoft's licensing of Spyglass
Mosiac required them to pay Spyglass for every copy of IE sold, which of
course ended up being nothing. Not sure how true that is.

Oh, here's a wikipedia link with a cite: "By including it free of charge on
their operating system, they did not have to pay royalties to Spyglass Inc,
resulting in a lawsuit and a US$8 million settlement on January 22, 1997." [1]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_versions#Ear...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_versions#Early_versions)

~~~
nly
It's very bittersweet. Not foreseeing that the browser would ever be given
away for free screwed them twice. In their IE licensing, and up against
Netscape.

------
amyjess
> I could have written the rest of the history of web browsers on that day --
> no other outcomes were possible.

It's really amazing how much things can change. Eric wrote this in 2003, when
IE was dominant by a ridiculous margin and everything else was a tiny niche.
It was written from the perspective that IE had won the browser wars forever.

Now, of course, IE has fallen from grace hard, and it's all about browsers
based on WebKit, Blink, and Gecko.

There are a number of things you can thank for that. One is MS sitting on
their browser for 5 years and doing nothing with it while everyone else kept
innovating. Another, probably more important one is the rise of mobile. Mobile
IE only ran on WinMo, when the early history of smartphones was dominated by
Symbian and its WebKit-based browser, and then iOS and Android took over with
their own WebKit-based browsers...

~~~
pjc50
_sitting on their browser for 5 years and doing nothing with it_

This was a consequence of the backfiring of the "embrace, extend, extinguish"
strategy and the enforcement of the consent decree. IE could no longer be a
product distributed free with Windows; it had to be part of the OS, because
that's what they'd argued in court. So nothing could change until the release
of Vista.

Remember, IE was reactive (in the strategic sense). Microsoft didn't really
want rich portable web applications to become a thing, they much preferred
businesses to tie their internal processes to VB client-server apps or
implement their functionality as ActiveX controls. A lot of them did and ended
up stuck to IE6 for a decade.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Internet_Explorer](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Internet_Explorer)

~~~
amyjess
Well, I remember at some point late in Vista's development, a bunch of news
articles appeared about how Microsoft was putting the long-ago-disbanded IE
team back together in response to Firefox's growing market share.

It's not like they were developing IE7 alongside Vista all those years but
couldn't release it until the rest of Vista was ready.

------
bigiain
I'm curious about whether Eric and JWZ have ever sat down over a few beers and
compared notes...

------
acqq
"I was asked to be the primary technical contact for Microsoft and their
effort to integrate our browser into Windows 95. I went to Redmond and worked
there for a couple of weeks as part of the "Chicago" team. It was fun, but
weird. They gave me my own office. At dinner time, everyone went to the
cafeteria for food and then went back to work. On my first night, I went back
to my hotel at 11:30pm. I was one of the first to leave."

Wow. Being old as I am now, I'd certainly avoid to work for such a company
without some immense compensation.

------
justcommenting
spyglass mosaic was one of the first browsers i used; even back then, i
remember thinking _spyglass_ was a peculiar name..

~~~
ericsink
The original business for Spyglass was scientific visualization tools. When we
did our "pivot" into web browsers, the company name stayed the same.

The science tools were sold to Brand Fortner, one of the original founders.

~~~
ericsink
And, er, nevermind that comment. It's redundant.

Lesson learned: Don't comment until you RTFA, even if you wrote TFA.

~~~
barking
[http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=TFA](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=TFA)

