The Flip Medley

As Yoda might say, “Ended, the browser wars have…”

AOL has end-of-life’d the Netscape browser.

Here’s a little background on why this is significant.

Netscape was the first company during the Internet era to challenge the desktop computing paradigm that made Bill Gates and the denizens of Microsoft so incredibly wealthy during the 80’s and early 90’s.

Of course, it’s 2008 folks and folks have short memories.

For example, how many of you remember that, before 9/11, the scariest threat we were facing was a potential conflict with China, which seemed incredibly likely after they “escorted” one of our spy planes down and returned it to us chopped up in little pieces?

So the public tends to have a short memory, and details are often lost when the collective consciousness is gorged on big, life-changing events like 9/11.

So let’s start at the beginning…

The world wide web, as you know it, is the creation of Tim Berners-Lee, not Al Gore.

To be more precise, the magic that occurs when you type in a web address, like http://www.neobeans.com/blog and see a website appear is what Sir Berners-Lee is responsible for.

The web is actually a combination of four things:

1. A standard for how documents are formatted called HTML. When you look at a web page, I hazard a guess that 99.999% of the time, it’s HTML. You can learn more about what HTML looks like at w3schools.com.
   
   That said, I still argue with friends about whether we accidentally created the hyperlink when we created a “disk-based news magazine for Atari ST owners” that allowed folks to click on icons or text to link to articles.
2. A client application, called a browser. This is where you’re probably using Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, or Opera. These programs know how to render HTML, and also know how to make requests to…
3. A server program, called a web server, which runs on a computer and allows documents to be requested from that machine via a URL. When you surf to http://www.neobeans.com/index.html, there is an instance of the Apache web server running on a machine whose name is www.neobeans.com, and your browser is asking for a document named /index.html.
4. Finally, to choreograph the dance between the browser and the server, and to describe all of the ways the browser can make a request and the server may respond to it, Berners-Lee created a protocol called HTTP.

That said, circa 1993 or so, the web itself was pretty minimal, but folks realized early on that there was not a lot of value to serving up static documents. The big shift came when folks figured out how to run small applications on the server in response to client requests.

For example, when you log in to your favorite social networking sites, like Facebook, MySpace, and OKCupid, you’re sending requests for “documents” that happen to kick off small “programs” that typically go out to some database, do a search for information that you care about, and then they create an HTML page on the fly to show you the results. Looking at a list of products when you do a search for big screen TVs on Amazon.com is no different than getting a list of hotties on Match.com based the fact that you’re looking for a single, female, non-smoker who likes long walks on the beach and margaritas.

Netscape’s claim to fame was the Netscape browser, which was regarded the “best” game in town until Microsoft began flexing their monopolistic muscle and began actively improving Internet Explorer. Microsoft’s interest in making a “better browser” was likely not just about building a better browser, but about controlling the client experience. They were likely more concerned about the fact that folks were beginning to think that the web browser might usher in a new paradigm that could replace the desktop computing paradigm that had made Microsoft rich.

Even more importantly, with the advent of more advanced client-side technologies, such as Java and JavaScript, and Flash, clients could also be treated to a user experience that was rich enough to cause folks to wonder if they would ultimately care about what sort of computer they had on their desktop, which could threaten Microsoft’s monopoly on operating systems. Interestingly enough, Microsoft’s behavior at this time to squelch the Netscape browser and Sun’s Java technology wound up getting them scrutinized in anti-trust court, where the penalties could have led to the splitting up of the company in to smaller entities, the same way AT&T was once split up in to the Baby Bells.

So what happened next? Well, I’ll write more about that in Part 2…