I don't get it are operating systems and computers supposed to ship without web browsers? You could argue literally any feature is put into a product to 'bundle and dump' to kill competitors. Why is a web browser something that should be a paid product with a so called competitive market to begin with?
Windows also comes with USB drivers but hypothetically I could drive down to Best Buy and choose from a number of different USB drivers I would have to pay for separately (I guess I should pick up a web browser too apparently). This would be preferable why?
> I don't get it are operating systems and computers supposed to ship without web browsers? You could argue literally any feature is put into a product to 'bundle and dump' to kill competitors.
A browser was a separate product at the time, not a feature. Microsoft bundled, as they have done many other times, for anticompetitive reasons.
only if the big car manufacturer made their own stereos/nagivators, and refused to do business with other vendors of such components in order to lock them out of the market.
It’s also worth noting at that time downloading an alternative browser probably over “dial up” was likely to take a couple of hours when you also had usage quotas and fees based on connection duration!
> Microsoft released version 1.0 of Internet Explorer as a part of the Windows 95 Plus Pack add-on. According to former Spyglass developer Eric Sink, Internet Explorer was based not on NCSA Mosaic as commonly believed, but on a version of Mosaic developed at Spyglass[33] (which itself was based upon NCSA Mosaic).
> This period of time would become known as the browser wars. Netscape Navigator was not free to the general public until January 1998,[34] while Internet Explorer and Internet Information Server have always been free or came bundled with an operating system and/or other applications. Meanwhile, Netscape faced increasing criticism for "featuritis" – putting a higher priority on adding new features than on making their products work properly. Netscape experienced its first bad quarter at the end of 1997 and underwent a large round of layoffs in January 1998.
Overall, lots of good points in your post. However, this one:
> Netscape Navigator was not free to the general public until January 1998
I am really dating myself here! I remember using Netscape pre-1998, and there is no way that I paid for it -- I was a broke uni student. (And, I don't think that I pirated it either.) Was I always using a (free) beta version? I cannot remember all of the details.
>And this was Netscape, not Firefox, you need to go back about ten years further.
Software tends to get bigger as time goes on, not smaller. Therefore the size of firefox in 2004 should be an upper bound for a browser back in the 90s.
Keep in mind that Netscape "Communicator" 4 wasn't just a browser. It was a browser, an email client, an NNTP client, an HTML editor, etc. Firefox was a fork that stripped all that junk out and made it lean and mean again.
Yeah, and the important detail here is all of this happened years after the "browser wars", which saw Netscape rapidly free-fall from being worth billions to being discontinued once IE was bundled with Windows 95. And then years later, Mozilla built Firefox from what remained.
