New browser war ahead?

Mark Andreesen thinks so

[photon]

From here [story.news.yahoo.com]:

Despite widespread Microsoft Internet Explorer use, alternative browsers like Safari and Firefox will grow in popularity and propel Microsoft toward more competitive strategies, says Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape Communications.

[Farix]

There has been a new browser war going on for the last year. It has just not been as vicious as the last browser war and hopefully the W3C will gain a lot ore relevancy this time around.

[Lord Majestic]

Marc Andreessen had many visions, most of which were broken after Netscape failed to come up with better browser than v4 that they released. Some people blame him for a number of wrong technical choices (he was CTO at the time). Oh well, its history now.

Has to agree with him on this one however - not sure if he helped Mozilla come true with a monetary donation.

[StupidScript]

MA had left Netscape following v.4, and the company was all balled up with court battles and such that had nothing to do with development. Sad.

MS in is an interesting position now that there are no new technologies to "license" (ahem). It's all on them to do the development, so don't expect them to tout the qualities of their browsers any time soon. They have been virtually ignoring their browsers for the past couple of years, publicity-wise anyway, because they have nothing new to offer except security patches.

Maybe this time around everyone will try to play by the same rules, re: standards support.

[ricfink]

what baloney.
the browser wars weren't about browsers - they were about who was going to control the standards that govern the web.
Open public standards have been established and are widely deployed.

Case closed. this is hype to sell something.

[gohankid77]

Actually, both sides are true.

They were both fighting to control the main browser "market". Whichever company succeeded would in effect control the standards. This is why Netscape used <ilayer> whereas Internet Explorer used <iframe> for standards. IE won the wars and because of this, IE got the chance to introduce proprietary markup. If it wasn't for Netscape Communications losing, proprietary markup might not have ever been born! Of course, if Netscape had won, would there even be a Camino, a Firefox, a Firebird, or a Mozilla browser? They are all based on the Gecko engine, and Netscape fosters the engine to this very day. Let's look at it another way. IE didn't release a stand-alone browser whereas Netscape helped to create the Mozilla project. This led to the multiple browsers above.

So, if the original topic ("New browser war ahead?") is still what we are talking about, this'll be phenomenal compared to the huge war between Netscape and IE (if it happens, of course).

(off-topic): I wonder if we would be using <ilayer> if Netscape had won...

[phantombookman]

Is there really a browser war?
The only battle in the 'real world' would be to get your browser on new machines.

Everyone I know (outside this game) uses the browser that appeared when they switched their new computer on!

[Lord Majestic]

They are all based on the Gecko engine, and Netscape fosters the engine to this very day

Netscape now is shadow of what it used to be - AFAIK all proper engineering was sacked, and few people managed to get jobs for Mozilla group that was funded in big part by AOL.

MarcA (as he was more commongly known at the time) proceeded to create other companies such as LoudCloud that followed similar pattern: hype -> float -> bail out