Asklemmy

43913 readers

317 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

173

Which software was ahead of its time? (self.asklemmy)

submitted 10 months ago by Windows94 to c/[email protected]

150 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 29 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

Uh... You must not know much about the history of browsers. Practically every browser designed for consumer operating systems cost money back then. Netscape Navigator was made free, but only for individuals, academics and researchers. Many individuals still paid for the full Netscape Communicator suite though. Netscape's IPO was probably the most successful tech IPO ever at the time, and their revenue increased significantly quarter over quarter. People would go to shops and buy boxed copies of Netscape.

That was the case until Microsoft bundled IE with Windows. That was one of the major points of the Microsoft antitrust lawsuit - browser developers were losing a lot of money because Microsoft were abusing their dominance and bundling IE for free.

Netscape became fully free in 1998 since there was not other way they'd be able to compete with IE. The code was open-sourced and became what we know as Firefox today.

[–] subtext 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

TIL… thanks for this. I did not actually know about the history of browsers.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

yea me neither, and I thought I did