MossyFeathers , 1 year ago

Netscape Navigator was the one and only reasonable choice in opposition to the standards-threatening, anticompetitive deployment of Internet Explorer for a good chunk of time.

From the Wikipedia article you linked:

Through the late 1990s, Netscape made sure that Navigator remained the technical leader among web browsers. New features included cookies, frames,[10] proxy auto-config,[11] and JavaScript (in version 2.0). Although those and other innovations eventually became open standards of the W3C and ECMA and were emulated by other browsers, they were often viewed as controversial. Netscape, according to critics, was more interested in bending the web to its own de facto “standards” (bypassing standards committees and thus marginalizing the commercial competition) than it was in fixing bugs in its products. Consumer rights advocates were particularly critical of cookies and of commercial web sites using them to invade individual privacy

It also talks about how while Internet Explorer was using a lot of proprietary HTML tags that made its sites incompatible with Netscape, Netscape was also doing the same thing.

I’ve always had confusion when it comes to hearing people talking about Netscape vs Microsoft because (and maybe this is just hindsight) iirc the biggest complaint Netscape had was that Microsoft was bundling IE with windows for free. However that’s such an obvious thing to do. You make an operating system. The internet is taking off. Your users are going to want some way of interacting with the internet that doesn’t require going to a computer store and buying a floppy disk or CD to access it. Obvious solution: bundle a browser with your OS.