Browsers - who wins?

bighairydog

bighairydog

tail-wagging member
OK, stimulated by the healthy discussion in the 25th bi-weekly browser discussion / AOL flame thread, I was wondering if anyone can answer this:

Where is the benefit to the makers of free browsers?

OK, so Mozlla is open source and supported by netscape so that's it sorted, but where's Microsoft's and Netscape's incentive to give out the product for free? All the other ones like omniweb seem to be supported by donations, but where are the big 2 getting the money from?

I'm interested how it works

Bernie :eek:)
 
Netscape isn't doing it by choice. Back in the day when Netscape was the big boy and IE truly did suck, Microsoft started bundling their browser with Windows. That meant that people didn't have to download a new browser. On good old modem days, that was very convenient.

Microsoft didn't charge for Explorer. Netscape still did. Netscape was reasonable. Free for educational and I think only $30 commercial.

Microsoft's browser gradually got better, and they already had a huge installed userbase from Windows. They destroyed Netscape's market share by offering a competing product free. (BTW this is considered anti-competitve and is against the law). In order for Netscape to keep their browser around, they had to give it out for free too.

Netscape makes quite a bit of money (and so does Explorer) by selling those default links your browser comes with - you know, the ones you delete the moment after it's installed. :p
 
Originally posted by Jadey
Netscape makes quite a bit of money (and so does Explorer) by selling those default links your browser comes with - you know, the ones you delete the moment after it's installed. :p
Click to expand...

You mean the ones noone I know can remove so I have to navigate through every Windows system to change it, only to find they have installed a nifty program to change them back? Is that the ones? I HATE those sites!!!
 
Yes, those. :) And everytime you install them, they're there.

Well, it's clearly as stated above. Microsoft made it available for free, so Netscape had to, too. But they forgot to make their browser better at the same time, while MS *clearly* made good advances, one has to admit that. (Of course they did also add 'features' that made for many good jokes about microsoft and security.)

Basically, Microsoft wanted to rule our world, and they made it possible by starting to void markets with free products. They might not have had the better product, but the product was free. Now of course this puts up the question why people aren't switching to Linux all of the time and why MS is still leading at all, but that' easily settled: Once you *DO* have a monopoly, it serves exactly this function. People are dependent on you. They've done it with operating systems and learned from that. Sometimes they did it with an overload of new features, sometimes they made new operating systems and had the ability to code for them earlier on than competitors, that's where Office's market share comes from. (WordPerfect was the way to go before Windows 95 in the US, for example.) They knew that IE wasn't up to par with Netscape, so they made theirs free and put some energy behind it - not to make money, but to control yet another market. Maybe their plan once was to charge for IE later down the road. Ah, yeah, they made IE 6 only available to some of their operating systems, not for Macintosh for example, nor for Windows 95 and earlier. (Or am I wrong here? Guess not.)

Similar stories can be told in other markets and the bad guy (in software) is Microsoft most of the time.

It's a beast, and it must be finely segmented into pieces. As the judge ruled. He was right...
 
i use IE because it makes my pages look good... and it just works...

when i get my mac... omniweb or ie... i don't care, omni looks good, i'm used to IE just working, so maybe there will be a compromise somewhere inbetween...

mozilla sucks... pages look like shit and never render correctly... damn you'd figure with thousands of developers that they'd come up with something that works right...
 
well, Jadey has part of the answer. the bigger source of revenue is advertising and control of content, thus bringing about control of one's use of the internet.

both Netrape and Exploiter come with a default home page that sends you to their site to begin the daily internet experience. Hey, i can remember when i was almost addicted to "my netscape". Most people have no idea that you can turn that off. My girlfriend, because a friend at work had changed to Yahoo, still believes Yahoo is the internet. (but that's another story).

those opening pages are driven by advertising, the price of which is directly proportional to the number of hits they take. and they both take an unbelievable amount of hits.

they also control your links out of those pages, again limiting to other sites in their corporate network or sites that pay. Even when you search from netrape, the majority of search results in the top 10 will be their paid or partnered affiliates. There has been big money in this for a long time now.

I am guessing the statistics that center around these sites generate income in other ways as well, but the ones i mention here are the obvious ones.
 
oh, i forgot to mention that every time somebody enters a site it strengthens the position of that browser and makes it more powerful and improves the advertising revenues as well. websites know and keep track of what browsers their traffic is using. this is what pisses me off about the way the new browsers are treated. you still have to set them to id as either netrape or exploiter to get sites to let you in or else to display correctly. so the new browsers aren't even getting credit for the people who use them, hence continuing the lack of support they get from the overall internet community.

and for those who wonder, i set mine to netscape - lesser of the two beasts;)
 
Originally posted by Ed Spruiell
My girlfriend, because a friend at work had changed to Yahoo, still believes Yahoo is the internet. (but that's another story).
Click to expand...

Please, share...this was getting fun.
Does she deny the existence of other sites than Yahoo, or have she simply not found the input-line?
 
well alright, but just because the norsk with 10 feet of sno outside his window asked.

it is sorta that she hasn't found the input line. she thinks you have to start from yahoo to be able to find anything else. i mean, if you start with a blank page, where do you go? she wants to point and click her way out of yahoo. it is the only start page that she understands and that gives her enough choices to find what she wants.

but let me give a little background 1st. she learned to work a computer for the 1st time at her current job. it is obviously a pc and there are some gamers and geeks who play with it and fix it up the way they want it. to get out of the local network and onto the internet they have a link setup to yahoo. so to her, yahoo is the internet (as opposed to the local network). since it is the only page she has ever seen as a start page, it is the only start page she is comfortable with. and when she tells me that she can't find the internet, that means she can't find her yahoo. actually it means she can't find her browser or it isn't working. she still calls her brower the internet as well.

the most frustrating part of this is that she won't let me sit down and just teach her stuff. she only wants my help when she gets stuck. or as she puts it, she doesn't want to learn anything on the computer until she needs to. so therefore she knows nothing about bookmarks. i have a put a few in there hoping she would find them but she doesn't and again she just tells me she doesn't want to learn just to learn. To teach her anything i would have to sit beside her and watch her shop online for hours just to teach her one thing a day. I would have to watch and wait til i saw something she could do easier and then teach it to her.

i am just glad she finally bought herself a computer. it was mainly because of me that she got a mac. and she still complains some that it doesn't do everything just like her pc at work does but she is getting used to it. The dock works well for her because she can open the 4 or 5 programs she uses without having to open the harddrive. her inablilty to understand about the hd works is a whole other story, but i think you get the idea by now.:)
 
and for those who wonder, i set mine to netscape - lesser of the two beasts
Click to expand...

OK, Ed - I'm confused....:)

You've written in these forums that you despised AOL, and were against Mozilla/Netscape because of their ties to the media conglomerate.

So what happened? Did you see the light? Am I misreading your statement?

Have you finally been wooed by the great green lizard?
 
serpico - in order to get any of the new browsers to render correctly, one must have preferences set to identify as either ie or netscape. since i have to make this choice in order to view much of anything, i set mine for the latest version of netscape. that's all. i still use icab and i still don't like ie or netscape or any other lizard ware.

but really, i think every site should be able to give me a good view with my browser set to id itself as itself. the fact that sites promote the necessary use of ie or netrape is is one of those issues of controlling us and limiting competition that bothers me.
 
I like how other browsers identify themselves as NS or IE.

As a webbie, I get asked to make a site that works the same for everybody (in terms of functionality, javascript etc). Therefore I write it for the two major versions of Javascript: IE's fucked up version and NS's fucked up version. If someone else has a browser that supports one of these versions, such as OW using the Mozilla engine, then it should identify itself as such. It's not really saying "I am Mozilla", so much as saying "give me javascript code that is made for mozilla, because that's what I work best with"

If browsers didn't do this, that I'd have to keep a running list of which obscure crackpot 3rd world browsers like iCab likes what bits of javascript ;o) LOL

As long as you don't give a **** about browser usage statistics (and besides, people know about the problem, and can compensate for it by adjusting the statistics) then this is the best way to do things.

Bernie :eek:)
 
I know just how you feel, Ed, my mother is the same way. She has found the inputline, but she haven't quite figured out the idea of endings such as -com, .org, .net or .no.
If she wants a place called, say, Yahoo, she'll type Yahoo in the line and complain how stupid the computer is.
If she ever has a problem I don't get to see what it is, nor do I get to touch the computer cause she'll 'never learn by just watching', yet I'm supposed to instantly know the answer and tell her in the simplest possible way what went wrong.

We have two mice connected, one Logitech 4-button mouse with a scrollwheel with me, my dad and my little brother use, and the Apple Pro one-button mouse cause it's less complicated.
I've set up a profile for her, she clicks her name at login and she's taken to a place where the desktop is a manual of how to connect to the internet.
She, too, has a dock with 4 apps including Word, AppleWorks, Internet Exploder and Finder.
I've also put a link to our bank on the desktop cause it's easier than explaining it every time.
 
I hate IE 5.5 for windows. If you tell it to go to macosx, it just gives you an error. Any other half-intelligent browser would add the .com to it, and go to macosx.com, but noooooooooooo WINDOWS SUCKS! :(
 
voice - "i'll never learn by watching". i could hear my gf's voice as i read those words that i have heard several times. and the part about being expected to fix it right away (even though i can't figure out what she wants because she won't learn the correct terms for things) made me smile in comaradrie with you. At least my gf will let me take over the mouse to get the problem fixed faster.

when i got a new ergonomic keybaord, i got her one too. at first she thought she would return it, but after using it for a couple of days decided it really is better. but the pro mouse stays. of course she double clcks EVERYTHING ! I have never even shown her my graphire2 setup with the pen for a mouse as i know that would confuse her way too much.:p

so where is your mom's mail.app? that was noticably missing from her dock. I can't imagine her not wanting to use the modern marvel of email;) (or does she still think you need aol for that:D )
 
quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted by BlingBling 3k12

mozilla sucks... pages look like shit and never render correctly...
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I think even ed can admit that pages usually render correctly in mozilla. :D

I'm starting to despise this arguement.

Here are the basic positions

- I hate AOL I wont use Mozilla even though it benefits any company as much as it benefits AOL (aka Ed's opinion :D)

- Mozilla looks like crap, I'll just use IE

- Omniweb is beautiful

- Mozilla is fast

- Chimera is really damn fast and has huge potential, but it doesn't have enough features yet, so I'll just use IE

- I just use IE because its IE and I dont think that something else might be better.

- Chimera is cool (thats me :p)

So that basically sums up the arguement. Does anyone else have any other positions?
 
googolplex - i too weary of this circular argument. I plan on sitting this one out a day or two at least. But looking at your summary, i think the one thing we share is a frustration with folks who have absolutely NO SENSE of the politics involved and use ie for all the reasons you listed.

and i will concede that the last time i tried the moz, it rendered fine. The whole gui was ugly, but rendering was as good as any. keep in mind it has been 8 mos. or more since i have seen a copy. but it was my default browser at one point so i am aware that it 'works':). you'll notice that i have never tried to debate you on that issue;)
 
At least you say it works :).

It seems to me that people who just use IE are like people who just use windows.
 
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