This was at a time when there were still many different client applications for internet services such as FTP, Gopher, News, email of which a web browser was just one. It was only later with the emergence of web applications that it became clear the browser itself would become the universal client and actually be a platform in it's own right. Until then Windows being the dominant platform for internet apps looks like a straight forward extension of it's role as the dominant platform for desktop apps generally.
Microsoft moved aggressively to integrate internet client capabilities, mainly web client capabilities, directly into the desktop. This is what lead to many of Microsoft's regulatory problems because doing so integrated Internet Explorer components deeply into the operating system, which was seen as anticompetitive bundling. That issue aside, it also lead to windows long running internet security issues because it meant core operating system services were directly exposed to external networks, with minimal security protections.
> Microsoft moved aggressively to integrate internet client capabilities, mainly web client capabilities, directly into the desktop.
As I remember, they moved aggressively but only after failing to anticipate or even make significant early reactions to the "world wide web", which allowed Netscape Navigator to rapidly take the majority share of what should have been made obvious by the Mosaic browser. Microsoft would take years to respond.
And when they responded it wasn't really with the aim of making better products, but with aggressive (and possibly anti competitive) sales strategies and by introducing deliberate incompatibilities and proprietary features.
I think the very consumer oriented nature of MS made them the enemy number one in mainstream nerd culture, but this behavior is nothing new or different about Microsoft. Large corporations in general I believe are ill suited to "innovate" and that can't be fixed. Not just ill-suited actually but they actually stifle it. Despite everyone claiming they want innovation, when the rubber hits the road they actually don't. It's easy to sell small incremental improvements in performance or cost or features. It's hard to sell something that will obsolete a corporation's most profitable product, or make a VP's business redundant, or kill the sales strategy that the CEO's team has spent a decade perfecting.
It's not even innovation per se, simply reacting to something new well after the writing is on the wall and nobody can deny it is a challenge for an organization. Everyone from executives down to managers and even individual workers have their own fiefdoms that they protect so even things that would be quite clearly in the best interests of the business can be difficult to achieve. Intel is a great example of this with their server group protecting Itanium and holding their territory against the PC group, which resulted in the small upstart AMD defining the 64-bit extension to x86. And then not long afterwards, their PC group defended their turf against their mobile division which resulted in them completely failing in the smartphone market which has arguably almost entirely driven the woes they face today with TSMC overtaking their manufacturing capability and ARM Ltd, Apple, Amazon etc rivaling their high performance CPU design and server products.
(Sorry that rant ended up way off topic and doesn't really address what you wrote, I don't think you're wrong, just clarifying that Microsoft was aggressive in strategy but not in technology development or adoption)
When they realised that they wouldn't be able to marginalize the web, they licensed the Spyglass browser and bundled it as Internet Explorer. That was remarkably successful, as Windows users used that instead of bothering to install Netscape, and it wasn't long before many websites wouldn't work properly with anything but IE. However, over time Microsoft apparently put IE on a back-burner for further development as they tried to herd people back into their proprietary protocols. That left an opening for a comeback of Netscape in the form of Mozilla.
> It was only later with the emergence of web applications that it became clear the browser itself would become the universal client and actually be a platform in it's own right.
Outside of e-mail, the non-browser Internet applications were on their way out by the mid-90s. Mosaic put the first nail in their coffin and then Navigator hammered in a few more.
Graphical web browsing was just a richer experience than what Gopher offered. Netscape's support for Gopher, and like FTP, just made it a web-like experience. WAIS was essentially dead by the mid-90s.
Navigator obviated the need for myriad applications to access a bunch of different servers. It didn't help that as graphical browsers were gaining traction UMN decided to charge license fees for their gopher implementation while several early web servers were FOSS or at least freely licensed.
In 1995 if you wanted to start some Internet service there was no reason to do so on Gopher, WAIS, or some bespoke protocol. The web covered those services' capabilities and added a lot more, especially with HTTP 1.1. So I'd content the browser as a universal client for Internet services was pretty evident soon after Mosaic's release and a foregone conclusion with the release of Navigator.
Gopher was more widely used that WWW until 1994, and it was a basic install on most Internet nodes in the first few years of 90's. The point of Gopher was it was one of the first widely deployed protocols that allowed you to find things, like a Mosiac Browser to download. It died quickly but was an important stepping stone.
In 1990 IRC had average of 12 users :) (but other chat programs were used before IRC) . True FTP, other chats, MUDs, email, etc. were widely used/available.
I was reading a lot in the newsgroups starting in 1992 and saw a steady increase in http URLs being included in posts, and IIRC there was never a time when the frequency of gopher URLs exceeded that of http ones.
Note that the web is older than Gopherspace with the first gopher site appearing in mid-1991.
While looking up that last fact, I see that there was heavy interest in gopher by colleges and universities. Maybe our experiences differ because you were in college then?
Windows 98SE was full blown copy of Windows. For this to be correct we'd have to say that Windows 95 and 98 were just a kernel. If you're salty about the bundling of IE that started with various OEM releases of Windows 95 anyway, not 98SE and not even 98.
Sort of. Microsoft’s goal was to funnel you into a minimally viable browser and funnel you into grownup apps.
Once they killed Netscape, they literally disbanded the IE team. They also did anti-competitive shit like buy and slow-roll Hotmail to protect the golden goose. (enterprise EAs of windows and office + oem licensing.)
They are doing the same thing today with identity and security for enterprises.
Chrome is Google’s attempt at a first party solution stack. It’s weird though as chrome is owned by different teams in Google than other user facing products.
I don't know that I buy that being the strategy, at least all the time. HTAs were a very early swing at what 'Progressive Web Apps' are today and back when you had access to activex components, etc those apps could do tons of stuff. Of course, the security attack surface was a nightmare so that all got slowly murdered, but I think at one point there probably was a serious attempt to let people build real apps using web technologies.
Google promotes building (and builds themselves) in such a way that it only works well on Chrome, just barely works on Firefox and Safari, and doesn't work at all in any other browser.
Unless you count reframed Chromium as "other browser", the equivalent of using Microsoft's IE-based WebBrowser component back in the day.
Without ActiveX support of course as that depended on Windows DLLs.
Not that that was a bad thing though. As mentioned it is a really bad idea to auto download code off some random website and execute it. Naive we all were back then...
Look at release schedule after ie 6 there were almost no major upgrades for years. Ie 7 was a pretty minimal upgrade. It wasn’t until ie8 did they start doing new features again and this is only after chrome started taking massive mindshare
Windows 95 was in some ways ahead of its time, with the melding between Explorer and Internet Explorer giving us Active Desktop (HTML as Desktop Background), the sidebars in the Explorer made from HTML and the seamless combination of local and remote files (with both SMB and FTP being first-class citizens in the Explorer).
The concepts had great potential, but they were either too early and removed (not enough resources to spare back then to put HTML everywhere), or kept in much the same state and never really expanded on
My comment in another post about how there are really two versions of Windows 95, and most of the things you describe didn't exist until the later versions, not available until 96/97:
As an addition to this, it's worth remembering that the retail version of Windows 95 did not enable TCP/IP out of the box. While it was included, you had to separately install it yourself. The default protocol was originally NetBEUI:
Yeah, those features started showing up first in the regular builds of Windows Nashville. I was downloading them almost daily to see the (at the time) amazing new UI concepts that were being tested:
Does anyone know why? This still seems to have quite a bit of potential to me.
Besides that: Is my intuition correct that they barely innovated in user-facing features after the early 2000s? Yeah, they broke everyone's workflows once or twice, but nothing about the way things work seems to really have changed, especially not in ways seen before elsewhere.
A file system as a database is one of those things that makes a good pitch but falls down pretty hard once you try implementing it. It falls apart faster if you've got to touch the Internet.
The first and biggest problem is that different types of files have metadata they consider to be important. Author and editor information useful for collaborative editing in a Word document is immaterial to a static raster image saved with a lossy codec. So your database ends up with dozens to hundreds of schemas to store metadata. You still need to serialized and deserialize metadata on files going out or coming in. If some unrelated application (not the authoring application) went and edited the database, which metadata for that file is canonical? The world may never know.
If you're building some metadata management database that's also storing binary blobs on addressed blocks on a disk, you might as well use a traditional file system and have a read-only database on top.
That way the file system stores bytes. An application unrelated to authoring can safely shuffle those bytes over the Internet. It's up to an authoring/editing application to store appropriate metadata.
The files themselves always have the canonical metadata and the read-only database for finding/organizing the files can just update when it's notified of a change in the file.
The database can focus on database things and the file system can make sure bytes go where they need to be. This also gives the flexibility to swap out either the file system or database at any time. This is the way Windows and macOS went and how many Linux DEs work.
They were innovating behind-the-scenes, but the stuff just never made it out. I was doing some forward-looking stuff on contract for them. I thought Windows Phone was innovative, myself, and really easy to develop for, but for whatever reason it never gained the traction of its competitors.
As far as I can tell, the advanced features of Longhorn like WinFS just kept on running over schedule and eventually they had to cut down the scope and release Vista.
That was WinFS in Longhorn, that became Vista. The filesystem as database thing wasn't in the 9x days AFAIK.
Still think it would have been a great idea. Of course it was being planned for Linux too as ReiserFS but then he went off killing his wife and that was the end of that.
Not sure why MS ever dropped the idea of WinFS. It has merit IMO.
That was a bit different though. It didn't really have labels in a consistent way.
I agree folders are still great to have but I don't think the idea of a database-driven filesystem precludes that. It will just add more organisation options, not take any away.
If you don’t take away folders then the ‘database filesystem’ is not the main way of accessing files. And then it is nothing more than an index like those used by Spotlight or Cortana.
If you’re going to make a drastic move like switching the filesystem paradigm you need some really convincing arguments to sell it. More than ‘some organisation options’.
Did the original Windows 95 even have a TCP/IP stack? I think the first copy came with MSN, but it wasn't until the Plus pack that it came with a browser. IE4 was the active desktop and wasn't out until September 1997.
Windows 95 had a native TCP/IP stack. Lan Manager had it from 1990 (a bunch of that expertise came from hires from Finland). And Windows NT had it in 1994. In '95 everyone was using TCP/IP and pretty much was standard at M$. I was there. It's true the browser didn't kick into high gear until '97 after Microsoft decide set-top boxes might not be information access solution of the near future. Microsoft was a little slow to admit that the Internet might win but eventually they came 'round and put some effort into it. Interestingly, both Gopher and Mosaic came out of Midwest universities in early '90s - great stuff, fun times.
Windows 95 OSR2 IIRC. If you bought Plus! I believe that upgraded you to OSR2 but there was an independent update and OEM build. I got a PC in 1997 with two USB ports but the documentation said they wouldn't work until a later Windows 95 release.
By some means I got OSR2 and the USB ports showed up in the Device Manager but it I had to wait a few years before I even owned a USB device to use with them.
Windows definitely shipped a universal WebView long before anyone else would. For a long time software like Steam would still shove an embedded IE component into dialog boxes and windows to show formatted and/or dynamic content. Being able to rely on having access to a consistent HTML renderer with scripting was huge for frontend software dev.
These days people just ship 50+mb worth of chromium goo with every application instead, but Windows definitely lead the way there and did so very early.
> The information and software has been free for 15 years, we need to be careful to embrace the current technologies and community before we attempt to reshape it.
this all seems very familiar (IE, media players, and now Edge/WSL/VSCode)
It's quite obvious where they're doing it. VSCode doesn't support some Microsoft extensions if you don't use the official builds (which are proprietary, contain telemetry and nagware) and doesn't have the official extension store.
Take the software that's open and run. They haven't changed. They WILL try to fuck you over.
The people running to Gitlab were overreacting when they did, but may eventually be proven right too. Microsoft has shown it hasn't really abandoned its tendency to back-stab its users and itself.
The beautiful Web 1.0 as I remember it. No background color tags, so your text was always on top of the default window control color: medium grey. It's all been downhill since then, right? RIGHT?
Phase 3: Windows as the Global Infostructure Explorer (Innovate) ... Specialized tools like gopher, FTP and WWW become old hat ... existing Domain Name System is becomes quickly eclipsed by the Cairo directory service ... Windows becomes the global infostructure explorer ... The hottest content server on the Internet? Microsoft Marvel ...
I remember those days, and for a while it seemed that Microsoft was going to pull it off. Windows everywhere, other systems locked out by proprietary protocols.
Edit: sure, I was paranoid, but I think Microsoft really was out to kill (metaphorically) everybody who didn't fall into line.
And this is where Internet Explorer idea was born and IE was deemed to dominate internet for decades to come until Google and Chrome came. Idk why Microsoft didn't make proper internet search engine because Archie and WAIS were bad and if Microsoft did it Google wouldn't probably even exist meaning bigger revenue and market cap for Microsoft.
They didn’t get it then, and they still don’t get it, but they directly reference their competitors that did. AOL did it better then, and better than anybody now. Seriously; I’m not kidding. AOL on a dial-up delivered better service than Office365 or even GSuite on broadband. The key is mobile code. AOL pushed monkey patches with almost zero service interruption, and it was lean, no massive dependency tree that had to be reloaded in full every time the user hit the service. And still nobody can figure this out even on Android/iOS where the app runs natively. Today a new version means the app reinstalls from scratch. Web cache is basically unused anymore.
So the browser was objectively awful, but platforms like AOL could not keep up with the demand growth for dial-up. They also had some issues with scale, which the browser did not, because all it did was read static files. So everybody got on $5.99 EarthLink instead of $29.99 AOL/CompuServe/Prodigy. The other part of it was the 1994(?) CDA, which was effective only at killing AOL with law suits, and completely impotent against thousands of random web hosts.
So now the browser is dominant no matter how awful because nobody can develop software for the internet when they’re going to get fined because somebody uses it for adult material. Microsoft had some attempts at internet-native applications like ActiveX and their own Java, but then the decision was made to force everything internet into the browser to compete against Netscape, and focus the server on http components on IIS to compete against Apache.
I think Microsoft could have gotten to “Stage 3: Windows on the internet” if they just ignored the browser and focused on their client/server application developers. As it was, they wasted two decades on the browser and gave the “apps” market to iOS/android.
But, okay, step back and ask what they were really after. It was the advertising business on MSN.com, which was the default home page on IE, and 95% of users left it like that, while yahoo was the default for Netscape. As MSN was losing out to google, Microsoft’s ad business execs tried to salvage their business unit by purchasing resale ad spots on TheFaceBook.com in a $240M deal. This was also the time when browsers would regularly fail and kill everything you were doing, and so the final nail in Microsoft’s internet portal/banner ad ambitions was the release of google chrome, which simply isolated failures by running each tab in a new process.
Put in that perspective, it seems they could have just provided a service to desktop app developers to use their ad network, like iAds. DoubleClick had some things like this, but it was a pain, and you really had to jump through hoops to get your app approved for native banner spots versus web site banners. Seems like Microsoft developers were really screaming for solutions here that they could have provided. App Store too.
So, I do t think they lost the internet browser wars. I think they just abandoned their base to try and copy Netscape and yahoo.
I had a look on google trends, and the product he was flogging seems about as popular on a global scale over the last year as the person who came 3rd in the recent byelection in the UK.
Microsoft moved aggressively to integrate internet client capabilities, mainly web client capabilities, directly into the desktop. This is what lead to many of Microsoft's regulatory problems because doing so integrated Internet Explorer components deeply into the operating system, which was seen as anticompetitive bundling. That issue aside, it also lead to windows long running internet security issues because it meant core operating system services were directly exposed to external networks, with minimal security protections.