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Why I wish Netscape had survived

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Netscape

David Coursey AnchorDesk

Published: 02 Jun 2003 14:22 BST

The settlement of the legal battle between Microsoft and AOL Time Warner means Netscape can now be taken off life support and the body harvested for any useful parts that remain.

The romantic in me says this is a terrible fate for a company whose Mosaic/Netscape browser changed the technology world so much. The realist in me responds that this only proves how overrated "first-mover advantage" really is. How many of the first companies to do anything are still in business when the industry matures?

I hate to be overly morbid or graphic, but Netscape actually died a long time ago. By the time AOL bought the company in 1999, the glory days of the Navigator browser were long over. An independent Netscape might have survived as an enterprise software company, maybe as an online media company. But AOL was already the second and didn't need the first.

What AOL did need was a convincing weapon against Microsoft. And now AOL Time Warner, for a mere $750m (real money to you and me, but little more than chump change to Microsoft), has signed the peace treaty and declared Internet Explorer its official browser of the future.

AOL Time Warner is now presumably no longer trying to punish Microsoft -- and vice versa. But what about you and me, the browser users? Are we being punished?

More specifically, will the end of Netscape mean the end of third-party browsers? No. It just means that the best one is gone and that Windows is now, for all intents and purposes, a non-MS-browser free zone. The only alternative browsers I can think of are Opera and Mozilla, neither of which I think about very often. There's nothing wrong with these other browsers, but nothing so incredibly right that I want to use them.

Mac OS has non-MS browsers, Opera and Apple's own Safari, as well as Internet Explorer. How many of these will be left in 24 months is anyone's guess, but I use Safari on my Macs.

In the Linux world, Microsoft isn't a browser player. But most of us don't play with desktop Linux, so what happens there doesn't matter much to many of us. Linux could have a browser that's 10 times better than Internet Explorer, and few would switch from Windows to use it.

But is a better browser even possible? Is there anything that should be in a browser that isn't there now? Are we ready to accept the browser as a part of the operating system rather than as an application? Has the browser been effectively assimilated into Windows XP?