Comments on: How History Gets Warped — Not Forgotten — to Conceal Microsoft Violations

By: NymShift

NymShift — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 19:53:26 +0000

Gee Roy I say netscape sucked on your IRC and you kicked me, then you go and post this saying the same thing yourself. or at least you got one of your minions to do your dirty work.

Once again ROY you’ve proven beyond doubt you have zero integrity anywhere.

I know you wanted to push how MS was bad and killed netscape, and as your “boy” (roy’s boys) points out netscape was a peice of crap, I said it on your IRC and you kicked me.

You are constantly caught out with your untruths and blant lies. zealot is too light a word for you chum(P)

By: Roy Schestowitz

Roy Schestowitz — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 18:41:44 +0000

Have a look at the links above, particularly the ones about Icahn. It’s called “proxy fighting” (the technical term).

By: The Mad Hatter

The Mad Hatter — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 18:38:36 +0000

Someone should ask Jerry Yang what really happened from when Microsoft made the first offer to when he resigned. It would probably make a good book.

By: David Gerard

David Gerard — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 15:06:36 +0000

*facepalm* Oh yes. CSS would only work at all with JS enabled, either would leave it susceptible to crashing.

By: Yuhong Bao

Yuhong Bao — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 14:24:24 +0000

Not to mention the CSS/JSSS disaster that made IE look much more standard-compliant at the time, which was basically that Netscape backed JSSS, but was forced to implement CSS at the last minute for Netscape 4 causing CSS support in it to be buggy.

By: David Gerard

David Gerard — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 14:07:22 +0000

It’s an important part of the history of Netscape that their problems were strategic *as well*. The Netscape 4.5 line was a horribly unstable piece of crap – the codebase had reached the stage of the Big Ball Of Mud where any bugfix produces two more bugs. I wanted to use it but IE4/5 was actually a *much better web browser* at the time.

Microsoft’s appalling behaviour does need to remain on the historical record. But it was arguably not necessary – Netscape 4.5 *sucked*.

I started testing Mozilla as soon as it was even slightly usable, around mid-2000 because it was important – not because it was good – it was terrible. Fat, slow and ridiculously unstable. It wasn’t really recommendable to normal humans until about 0.9.2 (early 2001), after the big stability push after 0.9. Then it was much nicer and, being in testable condition, improved much more rapidly, and 1.0 (mid-2002) was actually really nice for its day.