On Saturday, 9 January 2016 at 14:01:20 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad
wrote:
On Saturday, 9 January 2016 at 13:43:09 UTC, Joakim wrote:
On Saturday, 9 January 2016 at 10:13:01 UTC, Ola Fosheim
Grøstad wrote:
On Saturday, 9 January 2016 at 04:24:05 UTC, Joakim wrote:
How is it "political?" My prediction is entirely geared
around hardware and software realities.
No, businesses don't want P2P, client-server is the ultimate
dongle...
Copy protection. Anti-piracy measure in hardware.
Heh, the web had none until very recently, and that's something
most businesses don't use.
I've used it in a couple different countries, it's surpringly
good. Not 100% accurate, but no map is.
It is good enough for inner-city, but not as a pedestrian
looking for shortcuts, going for walks/biking in the
forest/mountains or driving in rural areas.
And there's some paper map out there that has all that and is up
to date? :)
So nothing important changed about the web technology itself,
you're just impressed by its success?
I has changed dramatically over the past 5 years.
Right, my original question was what changed in the tech so that
you're now impressed? Since you don't name anything, doesn't
sound like anything in the tech itself caused the change in your
impression.
No, you'd still have been going online through proprietary
networks like Prodigy, CompuServe, AOL, or The Microsoft
Network: :)
Or maybe there would have been a market for commercial
browsers, like Opera.
Sure, my original point was that it took the commercial backing
of Netscape. If it would have happened a lot later because of a
commercial backer like Opera, the point still stands that it gets
nowhere as an OSS project alone, without a commercial backer,
especially back then when most people weren't online.
On Saturday, 9 January 2016 at 14:12:22 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad
wrote:
On Saturday, 9 January 2016 at 14:01:20 UTC, Ola Fosheim
Grøstad wrote:
Or maybe there would have been a market for commercial
browsers, like Opera.
This timeline is quite telling:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/Timeline_of_web_browsers.svg
It is rather obvious that the web would have evolved without
Netscape. But Internet Explorer could have become completely
dominating, of course.
I'm not sure what that timeline tells you, as it leaves out
market share. Netscape dominated that early period, before IE
gained steam because MS bundled it with Windows. The fact that
there were many other browsers with negligible share is neither
here nor there; it was the commercial backing of Netscape that
built the web audience, before commercially-backed IE came in and
took it.
