[Gllug] Re: Gllug Digest, Vol 13, Issue 33

[Christopher Currie]

In message <20040714152443.3D5BFE6D99 at mail.ukfsn.org> Richard Jones writes:
> 
> On Wed, Jul 14, 2004 at 04:09:49PM +0100, John Hearns wrote:
> > On Wed, 2004-07-14 at 15:59, Richard Jones wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > Was IE 10 times better than Netscape Navigator?
> 
> No, but Microsoft illegally leveraged their desktop (Windows) monopoly
> to force people to use IE.  They were even found guilty and convicted,
> but obviously to no effect.  When your competitor is a monopoly,
> competition and normal rules don't apply.
> 
> > Very probably not... it was just given away free at a time when
> > Navigator had costs.
> 
> Did anyone ever actually pay for Navigator?  Just curious ...

Hardly. The only cost of Netscape Nav to most categories of user was that 
it wasn't bundled with Windows, so you had to get hold of a copy on 
floppies/CD..or download it by ftp, which the average user couldn't cope 
with, or with IE, which seemed pointless to most of them.

For the same reason, everyone used the successive crap MS email clients.
A serious defect of those (which no-one ever mentions) is that stored
mail is held in an MS-encrypted database, not in ordinary folders/files
as with most email clients; and the mail client is the only decoding
software provided, so for long-term archiving it's
dead meat (what Fukuyama really meant by 'the end of history'). 
And the databases of successive MS clients were in completely
different formats...

Travelling in the US in 2001, I noticed that all the public libraries i
visited that offered internet access were still using Navigator 4.

And people are still building websites requiring IE for remote 
data maintenance, even when the public pages are accessible with 
any browser. 

Any employee of a company that has such a website, who has to 
work from home from time to time, has to use Windows and IE even 
if (s)he never uses those products for any other purpose.

Does Crossover Office allow you to use IE effectively on a Linux platform?

Christopher
-- 
Christopher Currie	
ccurrie at bloxwich.demon.co.uk	
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