When I first started out on the Internet the software I used was loose collection of shareware utilities. Any inclination I had towards an integrated suite of utilities was kicked out of me by a kludge of a program called WinQVT. It's newsgroup reader was prone to fall over anytime and I mainly used it for Telneting. Mosaic was not enabled for printing or needed Win32s. Trumpet Winsock was the anchor for the whole show and rarely failed me. There wasn't a Microsoft product among the lot of them and didn't ever look like being one. The Net was the for nerds and hackers. Serious users favoured CompuServe or Cix.
Netscape was therefore like a bolt from the blue. Even the early 0.96 beta worked far better than Mosaic and it felt like a professional product. It was remarkably intuitive, particularly the early newsreader which worked quite differently from today's version. Netscape quickly became my main application and I raved about in .sig lines. I was therefore unsurprised to see the company prosper although the sheer heights it has scaled amaze me.
For many people entering the Internet this year Netscape is the only application they've ever used. It now has email facilities, most FTP servers now have a Web front end and the newsgroup browser is back on track after a loss of direction around in between 1.0 and 2.0. Into this celebration marches Microsoft, it's suddenly woken up to the Net and brought it's full technical might to bear on integrated browser technology.
This might appear laughable to anyone whose encountered the glitches in Windows '95's dial-up scripting tool, a case of nice stack, shame about the applet. It has little documentation, minimalist help files and nested option menus that'll have you crying out for tabbed dialogues. Check out any associated newsgroup to hear the cries of anguish. If Microsoft can't produce a decent replacement for Peter Tattam's brainchild why should they stomp all over the Web Market?
Unfortunately all is fair in love, war and the Net, as anyone who's played at flame wars can testify. The Microsoft name confers reliability and respectability to even the most dog-eared product so Internet Explorer is liable to pick up staid adherents whatever. If that sounds mean then let me add that IE3 does do the business, it's a sure-footed product that handles web-crawling well. Redmond's much communicated strategy to meld the browser interface and Windows is also likely to herd a lot of people towards IE on the basis of it possibly being the future of Graphical User Interfaces. You may note from my tone that I do regret the stormy seas Nashville has caused Netscape to, ahem, navigate.
In my book innovators should get a pay-off for their risk-taking and consumers deserve a chance to catch breath and just get down to using email, the usenet and WWW without constantly downloading and upgrading everything in sight. One of the perks of having used Eudora for three years is being able to sort through all my correspondence quickly, and No I don't delete my email, it's taking up no physical space and what's a hard drive for if not your stuff, certainly not to look pretty as a perfectly partitioned and defragmented display piece. Now if I'd flitted between Netscape Mail, Exchange and MS Mail I'd have no idea where any of it was and probably throw in the towel...