This is the second part in the series of the story of Netscape and Enterprise Desktop Browsers. In the previous post we saw how Netscape died. Here we see what else was happening while Netscape was getting older.
While Netscape was enjoying popularity, there were other browsers catching up on the seen. One of them was Mozilla Suite. Another was Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer had a major advantage over other browsers. First, that it was bundled with Windows platform. Second that it Windows being present on almost every desktop, provided the reach to Internet Explorer to make it popular. Third, Internet Explorer being the default browser (on Mac OS and Windows) provided it the visibility. You click an email link and it came up in Internet Explorer.
Essentially Internet Explorer was the next big thing to happen, and happen it did. With almost no obvious downside to it, the enterprises adopted it. Actually they didn’t have to adopt it. It was already there on the desktop and enterprises didn’t need to go the extra step to remove it. “Web standards” was still a term alien to the end-users and to the web developers to an extent. No one cared because there weren’t too many technologies. Things just worked; almost. Internet Explorer started enjoying a monopoly during this time and implemented proprietary technology to achieve functionality similar to the standard. This deviation from standards eventually led to dissimilarities in content rendering. Developers got around this by writing (part of) code separately for Internet Explorer.
The penetration of Windows platform on the home-desktop as well as enterprise servers extended the reach of Internet Explorer. Soon, Netscape started loosing its usage share and there was Internet Explorer all around. Applications thus were programmed to be compatible with it. They essentially has to be able to run on the most popular browser. Thus they started writing non-standard code which would work correctly on Internet Explorer. This drew huge criticism from developers all over and went unheard… till Internet Explorer 7 was released. People, developers and testers looking for a standard compliant browser started looking up to Mozilla, Netscape , Opera and other players in the market. A new browser to emerge during this period was Phoenix released in Sept 2003.
Internet Explorer was released in late 2006. It promised better support for web-standards, security, feature enhancement and more. With such impressive features came the need for adoption. The enterprises started feeling the pressure now. All proprietary code with several hacks invented and created by developers after long research started failing as the code was non standard. This didn’t impact the end-users as such but for the enterprises it meant big dollars. Enterprises are slow to adopt and upgrade.
Adopting Internet Explorer 7 meant revising the code and fix it to work correctly in the new version. And this translated into lots of work and time. Away from this and slightly earlier in 2003 Phoenix was facing it’s share of difficulty. The name Phoenix due to trademark issues with the BIOS manufacturer Phoenix, changed its name to Firebird. But that was not the end of troubles and the name has to be changed again to Mozilla Firebird as Firebird database server carried the name. Later Mozilla tried to learn and chose a name which would be similar to Firebird but would also be unique in the industry. Thus came Mozilla Firefox. With it’s extensive feature-set, enhancements, security features, I’d leave it to another post to cover reasons behind Firefox’s (growing) popularity.
Thus Netscape was old and dying, Internet Explorer 6 was the most used but was slowing down due to the availability of Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox with popularity growing as never before was becoming the favorite of everyone. The death of Netscape leaves enterprises in perplexity while IE6 ditched them and Netscape gone.
In the next post we’ll see what are some of the options the enterprises can explorer now. The story of Netscape and Enterprise Desktop Browsers – Part III
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