An example of a power-play and widely deployed de-facto standard that we resisted at Mozilla, wisely: ActiveX plugins. Independent companies emulated some of the ActiveX COM APIs, plus basic MS COM, on Unixen, in the '90s and into the noughties. Lack of spec and open source were not a barrier, and MS documented well.
Was MS abusing market power? The US v. Microsoft case said they were. They definitely caused plugin vendors to support ActiveX _en masse_. And they then dropped the old Netscape Plugin API, which led many such vendors to drop NPAPI too, leaving those plugins IE-only.
Yet we at Mozilla resisted ActiveX, successfully. We did not just hold the line, we restarted NPAPI incremental evolution via the plugin-futures@mozilla.org list I created, and meetings jst@mozilla.org and I convened with Apple, Opera, Real Networks, Dolby, and Macromedia.
Even a convicted monopolist couldn't ram ActiveX down other browser vendors' throats, when it could and did do so to plugin vendors and some web developers. Google with Chrome is not yet near MS IE's monopoly share. So again, I think you should be more skeptical of your own assertions and assumptions about "no choice".
"An example of a power-play and widely deployed de-facto standard that we resisted at Mozilla, wisely: ActiveX plugins. Independent companies emulated some of the ActiveX COM APIs, plus basic MS COM, on Unixen, in the '90s"
Thanks for doing this Brendan.
I was at a young startup at the time and an MS dev team gave us access to the IE Trident preview with ActiveX [0] and you could tell it was a pile of horse, without even implementing it.
'*you what?* create a plug-in, only works on IE,
then everyone has to download it?'
Totally against the grain of how the web worked and still works.
Was MS abusing market power? The US v. Microsoft case said they were. They definitely caused plugin vendors to support ActiveX _en masse_. And they then dropped the old Netscape Plugin API, which led many such vendors to drop NPAPI too, leaving those plugins IE-only.
Yet we at Mozilla resisted ActiveX, successfully. We did not just hold the line, we restarted NPAPI incremental evolution via the plugin-futures@mozilla.org list I created, and meetings jst@mozilla.org and I convened with Apple, Opera, Real Networks, Dolby, and Macromedia.
Even a convicted monopolist couldn't ram ActiveX down other browser vendors' throats, when it could and did do so to plugin vendors and some web developers. Google with Chrome is not yet near MS IE's monopoly share. So again, I think you should be more skeptical of your own assertions and assumptions about "no choice".