OBVIOUSLY you have decided to take them literally, and completely ignore the fact that revisionist history is far more polite to one's own past. OBVIOUSLY when he said "how we would fit in" he was metaphorcally referring to what they would do AFTER they stole the open standard of HTML, and practiced "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" on both HTML and Netscape. Anyone who ignores history can see that! Oh why must you cling to facts in such a stalwart manner? Facts are such stubborn things.

I've read jwz's grumblings from the netscape side of things, and through that IEBlog article -> Wikipedia article I found a link to a guy with some stories of writing what would become IE at Spyglass. I always find those interesting to read.

This gives me error 404: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/exhibits/684.pdf

we had no idea where the Internet would take the world
True. MS has historically been rather clueless about the net's potential. But then, so were lots of people. Note The Bubble.

or how we would fit in.
Also true. Just because they were using underhanded tactics doesn't mean they also knew those tactics would work. Note MS' historical sense of crisis, paranoia .

Thank God for IE. If it weren't for IE, we would all be "buying" the crappy Netscape browser and using Linux.

Well, Netscape was crappy. IE team were pioneers in CSS and DOM support when in the same time Netscape was inventing the great font, blink and layer tags.

Not to mention, without IE browsers would never be for free.

Asa, the correct link is http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/exhibits/684.pdf

Some people seems to defend Internet Explorer here, and it is true that without IE we probably wouldn't have a completely free browser (such as Firefox; IE is not a free browser, you have to buy Window to get it).

But the world would be a much nicer place if Microsoft was forbidden to include IE in Windows. When the computer manafacturers (Dell, Compaq, HP etc) would be allowed to include whatever browser they liked we would have a better developped IE (in respect ot web standards - such as HTML,DOM and CSS). We also would have 3 or 4 browsers to choose from and none of them would have so much market share that it would block development of the web...

So we did need IE, but we never need a product that has more than 50% market share such as IE, MS-Office or Windows itself.

Lets not forget that back in 1996, IE4 provided the end user with an interface that just worked, compared to the mind numbing experience of NS4. Without IE4, the .com boom probably would never have happened, and the Internet would be five years behind what it is now - that said without IE5/6, the Internet would be five years ahead of where it is now :/

Brilliantly put, Kroc !!

Little Penguin: "IE is not a free browser, you have to buy Window to get it)"

No, it runs fine on my Mac (which, granted, is pratically a totally different browser from the Windows version), and it's also available as a free download for Windows, which happens to be the only other platform it runs on. So it's not like you really need to buy Windows to run IE any more than you need to to run other programs that are Windows-only (ignoring the fact that there is a Mac version, and that at one time they produced one for UNIX).

No, I don't like IE, yes, I use Firefox, even on my Mac, but there WAS a point in time when IE was a Good Thing(TM). :-)

Actually, back in 1996, IE had hardly any market share. In 1997, it had less than 15%. Even by 1998, it was still only about 1/3. Netscape's IPO, back in 1995, was one of the watershed events that made most publicly traded companies sit up and take notice... and start to get themselves online. Amazon.com's IPO, one of the most widely watched in the dot com boom (and a measure of the future as it's IPO price was raised twice and still finished the day 30% up) was back in early 1997 as well. The dot com boom was well underway before Internet Explorer had any significant impact on anything.

Some of you seem to think you are pretty good at predicting the future, or what the present *would* be if something had been different in the past... the world and the net are pretty complex places and pretty hard to predict. I wouldn't be too overconfident that we know what *would* have happened if the MSIE/Netscape wars had gone differently.

Admittedly, we know some of our gripes about how things did go and how they've turned out so far, but even you all have pointed out some unintended consequences good and bad that no-one predicted earlier.

At least now we have proof of how MS plays the game. "Extending and owning HTML as a format" is exactly what they tried to do, and it worked for a while, much to the dismay of developers.

If it weren't for MS leveraging their OS monopoly, we probably wouldn't have free browsers.

Because of IE, web design is probably 4 years behind where it could be (exactly the time since IE6 was released... hmm) if the dominant browser had the level of standards support as all the others. IE doesn't have complete support for any standard published since 1996.

XMLHTTPRequest is MS' only real innovation this decade, but someone else would have thought of it eventually.

Don't forget how IE won over Netscape. IE had almost unlimited funding from virtually everyone who bought a PC. I'm sure you all paid for Netscape didn't you? Don't ever forget the power of a monopoly.

And be very, very wary of monopolies setting "standards".

All this "IE is bad because it dominated and stopped inovation" sounds familiar. Oh wait, it sounds like religion and truth. If people followed their religion blindly we would still be living on a flat earth (probably not using computers either). Go FSM!!!!!

IE was a competitive product leveraged by monopolistic behavior. The inevitable end does not justify the means. Nixon would have won re-election with or without the Watergate break ins. The entrance of MS into browsing pushed the industry forward without a doubt. But to say without it the net boom never would have happened is just silly. The boom started when more people were on AOL's handicapped browser than on IE.

IE later ossified and now there is FF trying to stir things up. Hopefully IE7 won't be a big brother ram hogging boon doggle and we'll actually reach a healthy market at some point towards the end of the decade. I doubt it, but it'd be nice.