174
Which software was ahead of its time?
(lemmy.world)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2024
174 points (97.8% liked)
Asklemmy
43855 readers
1653 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Opera?
The only web browser in the 90’s to try and charge money for a web browser‽
The only thing they were ahead of their time on is bilking people out of money for something that should have been free.
Uh... You must not know much about the history of browsers. Practically every browser designed for consumer operating systems cost money back then. Netscape Navigator was made free, but only for individuals, academics and researchers. Many individuals still paid for the full Netscape Communicator suite though. Netscape's IPO was probably the most successful tech IPO ever at the time, and their revenue increased significantly quarter over quarter. People would go to shops and buy boxed copies of Netscape.
That was the case until Microsoft bundled IE with Windows. That was one of the major points of the Microsoft antitrust lawsuit - browser developers were losing a lot of money because Microsoft were abusing their dominance and bundling IE for free.
Netscape became fully free in 1998 since there was not other way they'd be able to compete with IE. The code was open-sourced and became what we know as Firefox today.
TIL… thanks for this. I did not actually know about the history of browsers.
yea me neither, and I thought I did