In the recent flurry of Bill Gates quotings posted here of late, I seem
to recall somewhere that Bill said browsers are becoming to complex and
sophisticated to be given away for free anymore. Is he saying that
because he can no longer afford to dump his products onto the market at
the expense of other start-up competitors, or because he no longer feels
he has a competitor. Netscape seems to have been pretty well crushed.
Sure AOL bought Netcenter and partnered with Sun to take over product
development. I just don't see these organizations being as aggressive
in producing subsequent versions of the Netscape browser. I have been
under the impression that Netscape is providing support for
mozilla.org. My guess is that may be less substantial in the future.
I hope the Netscape servers do continue to be viable options for
organizations who want relatively easy to use inter/intranet servers.
There are currently aspects of Netscape's servers that make them
superior to IIS. Two of these are that Netscape currently does a better
job supporting PKI, and that Netscape servers run on Unix. I see this
first gap closing. I don't remember having heard about MS working on a
64-bit NT. Solaris 7 *is* 64-bit. This means that, at the medium to
high end, Unix has a considerable advantage. I warn people not to under
estimate the value of the small end. That is where a lot of the action
is likely to happen in the near future, and if you get the revenues from
the small end, you will have the bucks to break into the high end.
There had been a push to port the Netscape servers to Linux. I believe
this has been pushed onto the back burner. Again I don't see Sun
jumping up and down about supporting Linux. MS may fear Linux, but Sun
*should* fear Linux. At the very high end Sun will probably hold onto
an advantage for several years. At the ultrasparc II level, a dual
processor Merced running Linux could probably put a bite into Sun's
market share. As I remember, Linus said something along the lines of
'64-bit Linux? No problem! The inherent design of Linux will support
that naturally.'
I have strayed a bit from where I started this post. To get back to
browsers, I don't see anybody providing a quality integrated browser
solution for Linux other than Netscape. Mozilla.org may come through,
but they haven't produced anything more than beta demos so far. My
guess is many people don't see the need for many of the bells and
whistles that modern browsers have. Many of the features of a browser
are hidden from the user, and are not currently in extensive use. One
that I am most concerned with is the ability of IE to process VBscript.
If Bill gets sufficient control of the browser market he can make it so
that internet servers can be set up to generate pages containing
VBscript and ActiveX and function with most clients on the internet. If
that happens all browsers will have to process VBscript and ActiveX in
order to be viable competitors to IE. Most people won't want to haste
with trying to find and run anything less capable than IE. In this
scenario Bill gains a tighter grip on the browser market, which he
already announced he will be charging you for in the future. Not only
that, do you really believe MS will provide the Unix community with a
version of IE that is as reliable and functional as the win32 version?
I don't. And I don't expect Bill will lift a finger to provide anything
viable for Linux.
I may just be paranoid. I don't have a full grasp of every aspect of
this technology, but I am going through IIS training, and have worked
with both Apache and SuiteSpot. I have worked with NT since it was in
Beta, and have also worked with Novell, Solaris (sparc and x86), and
Linux. Not to mention DOS and Windows 3.1. My instincts tell me there
is a real danger here.
For those who like to tell me that major organizations cannot run
reliably on NT, I checked today. The Network I am on is world wide, and
has more than 70 NT domains. I don't have NT related problems very
often on this network. I am not trying to sell NT. I *am* getting my
MCSE because I believe it is a professionally prudent thing to do. I
like Linux. It smells like freedom to me, and I love freedom. I'm just
trying to get some sober thinking going on about these subjects.
Steve
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