Talk:Browser wars

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Contents 1 Monoculture for worms? 2 Chart 3 Mobile Devices 4 misc 5 Market share 6 I.E. 6 7 history 8 Pre-Browser Wars 9 IE vs Netscape - the takeup by users? 10 Consequences 11 Edits by 62.178.136.129 on 2 January 2007 12 graph at top of article 13 Picture creep

[edit] Monoculture for worms?

"The near-universal adoption of Internet Explorer has also created a monoculture which has widened the damage done by computer worms, which exploit software vulnerabilities to propagate themselves. The more machines exposing a given vulnerability, the more easily a worm will propagate."

Given the fact that there has yet to be any significant IE "worm", does this really do the article justice? Blaster and Sasser spread without IE. Nearly every definition of the term "worm" indicates compromising a large number of machines without the users having to do anything.

[edit] Chart

Guys, the chart is completely miseading and bad. The percentage on the left only applies to IE/Win, otherwise it would look like Netscape still has a 90%+ share in the early 21st century. It tries to be both a pie chart showing area constrained into a rectangle, as well as a regular chart, and it does neither very well.

Can someone come up with a non-hybrid version that sucks less and is more legible? I'll do it myself if someone posts a link to the initial data that led to the chart. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 155.33.109.95 (talk • contribs).

It's a stacked graph. I've always thought it was obvious. Does it really need to be clarified? -- Schapel 15:31, 3 March 2006 (UTC)

I agree with Schapel and personally believe the chart format is excellent; it well visualizes the impact of major events during the "War." 71.49.53.205 18:54, 17 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Mobile Devices

Under "Other browser competition", someone who has a good grasp of the mobile devices browser market should flesh out that section. -- Limulus 13:00, 5 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] misc

"the cause of the success" of computer worms might be a bit too strong. Maybe it should read "a major factor in the success" Lefty 22:49, 2004 Feb 24 (UTC)

Re FrontPage: The current version (from 62.252.0.4) has a paragraph about about web designers not using "best viewed in Netscape" with an explanation that this was because of IE's "more complete support for web standards such as CSS" and obscures the original point about Microsoft's FrontPage producing IE-friendly HTML (at the expense of Netscape interoperability). I've reverted this comment once. In context, this is a list of advantages Microsoft exercised in the browser wars. IMO, releasing and promoting the use of a tool that generated HTML that favored one browser over another was one of the many subtle or not so subtle ways Microsoft used to kill Netscape. The effect (as was desired by Microsoft) was that some web designers stopped using "best viewed in Netscape". Could we perhaps move the bit about "best viewed in" to another place in the article and leave Microsoft's promotion of FrontPage in the list? Rick Block 14:14, 5 Apr 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Market share

I pulled this...

However, IE's market share is currently estimated at 85% and dropping at a rate of 1% per 2 weeks.

Interestingly, following the CERT's well-publicized suggestion to use an alternative browser after a flood of IE invulnerabilities, Mozilla Firefox is widely said to gain 1% of the total browser market overnight.

Does anyone have a reliable source for these numbers? Also "widely said" by who? AlistairMcMillan 14:38, 16 Dec 2004 (UTC)

According to [1], firefox+moz has about 30% of the users, much more than in the graphics on this page. 150.227.16.253 10:46, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

Once again, the stats at W3 Schools are for that one site only. They are not representative of overall browser usage. See the usage share article for more details. -- Schapel 13:25, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] I.E. 6

There has been an update to IE since the article was written. It was bundled with Win XP Service Pack 2

There has not been any major feature-driven update of Internet Explorer for quite some time. Bug fixes are not considered to be "feature updates". In other words, there is no Internet Explorer 6.5 or 7.0, yet. -[Unknown] 03:29, Dec 22, 2004 (UTC)

Yes there has. IE 6 w/ SP2 has several new features--Will2k 05:24, Dec 22, 2004 (UTC)

Internet Explorer 6.0 Service Pack 2 is a security related update. While it has "new features" such as the information bar, these are not truly new features as much as security related changes. Windows 2000, for example, is a version of Windows. While there are more than a couple service packs for Windows 2000, Windows XP is the new version, not Windows 2000 Service Pack 4. A new version of Internet Explorer would, in kind, be a new version of it.

That means that "there have been no new versions of Internet Explorer since version 6.0" is totally true. And, my above statement - "There has not been any major feature-driven update of Internet Explorer for quite some time" is also true. Service Pack 2 was not a feature-driven update. It was not a new version - if it was, it would have been called 6.1 or something. This is of course the standard versioning system in computer science, and the way I and Microsoft both describe releases of our software. Had Service Pack 2 been a new version of Internet Explorer, you would see a new version number in your about dialog. It's really that simple. -[Unknown] 05:55, Dec 22, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] history

Can anyone substantiate the first and second paragraphs under history? These attribute specific motives to Microsoft that I don't know are verifiable, or even true. My impression (also probably not verifiable, and perhaps not true) is that Microsoft saw the web and the web browser as a potential threat to Windows as the dominant computer/user interface and therefore had to gain control of it (to limit its functionality and ensure the continued dominance of Windows). The point is if users spend most of their time in a browser, and browsers can run equally well on any OS, the OS becomes irrelevant. I think it's somewhat POV to make any claim about Microsoft's motives in this case (even, perhaps especially, direct quotes from Microsoft about their motives). My suggestion is to delete the entire second paragraph under history and delete the "Microsoft saw the success ..." clause from the first paragraph (leaving the sentence "Microsoft licensed Mosaic ..."). I think the facts are that Netscape was the defacto standard web browser and for whatever reason Microsoft decided to put them out of business. -- Rick Block 19:11, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)

How are acctual quotes NPOV? Removing this info would be NPOV.

[edit] Pre-Browser Wars

Since, outside of Wikipedia, the IE vs. Netscape wars is considered the first browser wars and the current browser wars with IE vs. Firefox is the second browsers wars, I think we should change

1. Browser Wars I: Mosaic Wars
2. Browser Wars II: Netscape Wars
3. Browser Wars III: Internet Explorer Wars

to

1. Pre-Browser Wars: Mosaic Wars
2. Browser Wars I: Netscape Wars
3. Browser Wars II: Internet Explorer Wars

--mathwizxp 01:50, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)

[edit] IE vs Netscape - the takeup by users?

Does any know what the takeup/takeover numbers for IE vs Netscape looked like in the 1990s, versus what the Firefox vs IE takeup/takeover numbers look like? I'm interested to see whether FF is grabbing market share more quickly or slowly that IE did when it first gained a serious foothold. --Richard@lbrc.org 16:25, 5 January 2006 (UTC)

See the Usage share of web browsers article for data on early adoption of IE. Be careful to compare numbers, because near the end of 1996 IE was included with Windows and therefore gained share very rapidly. -- Schapel 18:58, 5 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Consequences

Because Internet Explorer has the word "Internet" in its name, inexperienced users are sometimes misled into believing that Internet Explorer is the Internet...

To me, this paragraph seemed to be nothing more than unsupported speculation, with some advertisments thrown in for good measure. Can anyone offer a good reason to put it back? Cymsdale 19:37, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

Numerous legends of people calling tech support saying "I deleted the Internet, help!" come to mind... that's probably how that started. It's not worth putting in, unless there's a seperate article on stupid tech support callers. A search returns 163,000 results: [2]

--Planetary 22:49, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Edits by 62.178.136.129 on 2 January 2007

I removed

• Netscape's business model was not to give away its browser but sell server software...

It was Apache that killed Netscape business model not IIS. According to Apache HTTP Server "When first released, Apache was the only viable open source alternative to the Netscape web server (currently known as Sun Java System Web Server). It has since evolved to rival other Unix-based web servers in terms of functionality and performance. Since April 1996 Apache has been the most popular HTTP server on the Internet."

• Microsoft created licensing agreements with computer manufacturers...

That's simply not true. Sorry.

• Microsoft made it very easy for small and medium ISPs...

There was a CCK from Netscape that allowed ISP to configure and brand Netscape Navigator easily

-- 62.178.136.129 16:56, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] graph at top of article

Hi. I notice the graph shown in this article doesn't cite the source of its data (nor in the description page on the commons wikipedia), therefore I've added a ^{[citation needed]} tag until this is done. I have noticed some similar data, such as this, and I would be interested to see what sort of graph these numbers produce. I think it would be cool to have different shades of one colour for all the Netscape versions, and different shades of another colour for the IE versions. I would do this myself, if I had time. Any offers?! --Rebroad 10:56, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

I've been replacing the browser usage share graphs with data from usage share. I still have the two that list multiple browsers to do (the one in this article, and the one at the top of the usage share article). -- Schapel 13:12, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Picture creep

There's too many pictures in this article, to the point where the page looks cluttered. Is there a possibility that some can be removed? Inkbottle 00:53, 2 April 2007 (UTC)