Browser Wars, Internet Marketing Wars to scramble market part 2

Consequences

The browser wars encouraged three specific kinds of behavior among their combatants.

1. Adding new features instead of fixing bugs: A web browser had to have more new features than its competitor, or else it would be considered to be "falling behind." But with limited manpower to put towards development, this often meant that quality assurance suffered and that the software was released with serious bugs.
2. Adding proprietary features instead of obeying standards: A web browser is expected to follow the standards set down by standards committees (for example, by adhering to the HTML specifications) in order to assure interoperability of the Web for all users. But competition and innovation led to web browsers "extending" the standards with proprietary features (such as the HTML tags and ) without waiting for committee approval. Sometimes these extensions produced useful features that were adopted by other browsers, such as the XMLHttpRequest technology that resulted in Ajax.
3. Inadvertently creating security loopholes: In the race to add development features, the line between document and application is crossed, and the Active Content Exploit is born. This is because, whenever applications have been allowed to masquerade as documents (e.g. Master Mode, Office macros, etc.) anyone can slip malicious code into what is otherwise a trustworthy format. As a virus scanner can only detect a virus that is old enough to be catalogued (usually more than 48 hours), it cannot protect against a zero day attack. Thus this blurring of the boundary between application and document creates an easy access point that is the basis for delivery of nearly all of today's drive-by downloads and auto-loading malicious code.
   

Support for web standards was severely weakened. For years, innovation in web development stagnated as developers had to use obsolete and unnecessarily complex techniques to ensure their pages would render properly in Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer. Netscape Navigator 4 and IE6 lacked full compliance with several standards, including CSS and the PNG image format.
On February 2, 2008 the last update to Netscape Navigator 9 was released, based on Mozilla Firefox 2. However, it never regained its market share. Netscape was discontinued on March 1, 2008.

The second browser war

Usage share of non-IE web browsers according to Net Applications:      Firefox      Safari      Opera      Netscape      Mozilla      Chrome      Other

After the defeat of Navigator by Internet Explorer, Netscape open-sourced their browser code, and entrusted it to the newly formed non-profit Mozilla Foundation—a primarily community-driven project to create a successor to Netscape. Development continued for several years with little widespread adoption until a stripped-down browser-only version of the full suite was created, which included features, such as tabbed browsing and a separate search bar, that had previously only appeared in Opera. The browser-only version was initially named Phoenix, but because of trademark issues that name was changed, first to Firebird, then to Firefox. This browser became the focus of the Mozilla Foundation's development efforts and Mozilla Firefox 1.0 was released on 9 November 2004. Since then it has continued to gain an increasing share of the browser market.

In 2003, Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer 6 Service Pack 1 would be the last standalone version of its browser. Future enhancements would be dependent on Windows Vista, which would include new tools such as the WPF and XAML to enable developers to build extensive Web applications.
In response, in April 2004, the Mozilla Foundation and Opera Software joined efforts to develop new open technology standards which add more capability while remaining backward-compatible with existing technologies. The result of this collaboration was the WHATWG, a working group devoted to the fast creation of new standard definitions that would be submitted to the W3C for approval.

2006–2007

On 15 February 2005, Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer 7 would be available for Windows XP SP2 and later versions of Windows by mid-2005. The announcement introduced the new version of the browser as a major upgrade over Internet Explorer 6 SP1.
Opera had been a long-time small player in the browser wars, known for introducing innovative features such as tabbed browsing and mouse gestures, as well as being lightweight but feature-rich. The software, however, was commercial, which hampered its adoption compared to its free rivals until 2005, when the browser became freeware. On 20 June 2006, Opera Software released Opera 9 including an integrated source viewer, a BitTorrent client implementation and widgets. It was the first Windows browser to pass the Acid2 test. Opera Mini, a mobile browser, has significant mobile market share as well as being available on the Nintendo DS and Wii.
On 18 October 2006, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 7. It included tabbed browsing, a search bar, a phishing filter, and improved support for Web standards – all features familiar to Opera and Firefox users. Microsoft distributed Internet Explorer 7 to genuine Windows users (WGA) as a high priority update through Windows Update. Typical market share analysis showed only a slow uptake of Internet Explorer 7, and after statistics in September 2007 from w3schools.com showed Mozilla Firefox at 35.4% had taken over from Internet Explorer 6 at 34.9% as the most popular browser with Internet Explorer 7 lagging behind in third place at 20.8%, Microsoft dropped the requirement for WGA and made Internet Explorer 7 available to all Windows users in October 2007.




On 24 October 2006, Mozilla released Mozilla Firefox 2.0. It included the ability to reopen recently closed tabs, a session restore feature to resume work where it had been left after a crash, a phishing filter and a spell-checker for text fields.

In 2003, Apple had begun work on a new browser to replace Internet Explorer for Mac, as Microsoft announced on 13 June 2003 it was discontinuing their browser on the Mac platform. Basing the rendering engine on the open-source KHTML rendering engine from the Konqueror project, Apple created the WebKit project and a browser named Safari, which shipped with Mac OS X v10.3 later that year. On 6 June 2007, Apple released a beta version of Safari 3 for Microsoft Windows.

On 19 December 2007, Microsoft announced that an internal build of Internet Explorer 8 has passed the Acid2 CSS test in "IE8 standards mode" – the last of the major browsers to do so.

On 28 December 2007, Netscape announced that support for its Mozilla-derived Netscape Navigator would be discontinued on 1 February 2008, suggesting its users migrate to Mozilla Firefox. However, on 28 January 2008, Netscape announced that support would be extended to 1 March 2008, and mentioned Flock, alongside Firefox, as an alternative to its users.

source : wikipedia, W3C, ISO, Microsoft, Opera, Mozilla, Apple

Browser Wars, Internet Marketing Wars to scramble market part 1

The World Wide Web is an Internet-based hypertext system invented in the late 1980s and early 1990s by Tim Berners-Lee. Berners-Lee wrote the first web browser WorldWideWeb, later renamed Nexus, and released it for the NeXTstep platform in 1991.
By the end of 1992 other browsers had appeared, many of them based on the libwww library. These included Unix browsers such as Line Mode Browser, ViolaWWW, Erwise and MidasWWW, and MacWWW/Samba for the Mac. This created choice between browsers and hence the first real competition, especially on Unix.

The first browser war
By mid-1995 the World Wide Web had received a great deal of attention in popular culture and the mass media. Netscape Navigator was the most widely used web browser and Microsoft had licensed Mosaic to create Internet Explorer 1.0, which it had released as part of the Microsoft Windows 95 Plus! Pack in August.
Internet Explorer 2.0 was released as a free download three months later. Unlike Netscape Navigator it was available to all Windows users for free, even commercial companies. New versions of Netscape Navigator (later bundled with other applications and branded Netscape Communicator) and Internet Explorer were released at a rapid pace over the following few years.





Development was rapid and new features were routinely added, including Netscape's JavaScript (subsequently replicated by Microsoft's as JScript) and proprietary HTML tags such as the Blink and Marquee elements. The introduction of new features often took priority over bug fixes, resulting in unstable browsers, shaky web-standards compliance, frequent crashes and many security holes.

Internet Explorer began to approach feature parity with Netscape with version 3.0 (1996), which offered scripting support and the market's first commercial Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) implementation.
In October 1997 Internet Explorer 4.0 was released. The release party in San Francisco featured a ten-foot-tall letter "e" logo. Netscape employees showing up to work the following morning found the giant logo on their front lawn, with a sign attached that read "From the IE team ... We Love You". The Netscape employees promptly knocked it over and set a giant figure of their Mozilla dinosaur mascot atop it, holding a sign reading "Netscape 72, Microsoft 18" representing the market distribution.








Internet Explorer 4 changed the tides of the browser wars. It was integrated into Microsoft Windows, which IT professionals and industry critics considered technologically disadvantageous and an apparent exploitation of Microsoft's monopoly on the PC platform. Users were discouraged from using competing products because IE was "already there" on their PCs.

During these releases it was common for web designers to display 'best viewed in Netscape' or 'best viewed in Internet Explorer' logos. These images often identified a specific browser version and were commonly linked to a source from which the stated browser could be downloaded. These logos generally recognized the divergence between the standards supported by the browsers and signified which browser was used for testing the pages. In response, supporters of the principle that web sites should be compliant with World Wide Web Consortium standards and hence viewable with any browser started the "Viewable With Any Browser" campaign, which employed its own logo similar to the partisan ones.

Internet Explorer 5 &  6
Microsoft had three strong advantages in the browser wars.

One was resources: Netscape began with about 80% market share and a good deal of public goodwill, but as a relatively small company deriving the great bulk of its income from what was essentially a single product (Navigator and its derivatives), it was financially vulnerable. Netscape's total revenue never exceeded the interest income generated by Microsoft's cash on hand. Microsoft's vast resources allowed IE to remain free as the enormous revenues from Windows were used to fund its development and marketing. Netscape was commercial software for businesses but provided for free for home and education users; Internet Explorer was provided as free for Windows users, cutting off a significant revenue stream.

Another advantage was that Microsoft Windows had over 90% share of the desktop operating system market. IE was bundled with every copy of Windows; therefore Microsoft was able to dominate the market share easily as customers had IE as a default. In this time period, many new computer purchases were first computer purchases for home users or offices, and many of the users had never extensively used a web browser before, so had nothing to compare with and little motivation to consider alternatives; the great set of features they had gained in gaining access to the Internet and the World Wide Web at all made any modest differences in browser features or ergonomics pale in comparison.

The intended effect of these actions was to "cut off Netscape's air supply". These actions eventually led to the United States Microsoft antitrust case in 1998 which found that Microsoft had abused its monopoly on operating systems to unfairly dominate the market and eliminate competition. This, together with several bad business decisions on Netscape's part, led to Netscape's defeat by the end of 1998, after which the company was acquired by America Online for USD $4.2 billion. Internet Explorer became the new dominant browser, attaining a peak of about 96% of the web browser usage share during 2002, more than Netscape had at its peak.
The first browser war ended with Internet Explorer having no remaining serious competition for its market share. This also brought an end to the rapid innovation in web browsers; until 2006 there was only one new version of Internet Explorer since version 6.0 had been released in 2001. Internet Explorer 6.0 Service Pack 1 was developed as part of Windows XP SP1, and integrated into Windows Server 2003. Further enhancements were made to Internet Explorer in Windows XP SP2 (released in 2004), including a pop-up blocker and stronger default security settings against the installation of ActiveX controls. 

Source : Wikipedia, Microsoft, America Online, Google

Business Opportunities in EmailCashPro - get paid to read emails

Do you already know emailcashpro.com? If you ever hear or know about marketing this means clearly you memahamai system performance. But for those of you who do not know EmailCashPro is an advertising site with a new system.
where you just told to read the email sent to your email address and then paid to Singapore Dollar. Because this site is based in Singapore, membership has spread in countries Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia and did not rule in other countries including your country.
Perhaps in your country is not as much as who knows, maybe can be your sideline business opportunities.
Registration is easy, go to www.emailcashpro.com 
and enter a valid email address and enter the security number, click on " enter information. "  
Wait for incoming email into your email inbox, and then click to confirm. After that the contents of your personal data especially your real name (for verification entitled to be paid), as well as full address (location of the money paid). Easy, right? 

 To learn more go to http://www.emailcashpro.com/ .

by Kauthar Rivolta

Why there is free software

Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with minimal restrictions only to ensure that further recipients can also do these things and that manufacturers of consumer-facing hardware allow user modifications to their hardware. Free software is generally available without charge, but can have a fee, such as in the form of charging for CDs or other distribution medium among other ways.

In practice, for software to be distributed as free software, the human-readable form of the program (the source code) must be made available to the recipient along with a notice granting the above permissions. Such a notice either is a free software license, or a notice that the source code is released into the public domain.

The free software movement was conceived in 1983 by Richard Stallman to satisfy the need for and to give the benefit of software freedom to computer users. Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation in 1985 to provide the organizational structure to advance his Free Software ideas.

From 1998 onward, alternative terms for free software came into use. The most common are software libre, free and open source software(FOSS) and free, libre and open source software (FLOSS). The Software Freedom Law Center was founded in 2005 to protect and advance FLOSS.^[3] The antonym of free software is proprietary software or non-free software. Commercial software may be either free software or proprietary software, contrary to a popular misconception that commercial software is a synonym for proprietary software. An example of commercial free software is GNAT.

Free software, which may or may not be distributed free of charge, is distinct from freeware which, by definition, does not require payment for use. The authors or copyright holders of freeware may retain all rights to the software; it is not necessarily permissible to reverse engineer, modify, or redistribute freeware.

Since free software may be freely redistributed it is generally available at little or no cost. Free software business models are usually based on adding value such as applications, support, training, customization, integration, or certification. At the same time, some business models which work with proprietary software are not compatible with free software, such as those that depend on the user to pay for a license in order to lawfully use the software product.

In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, it was normal for computer users to have the software freedoms provided by free software. Software was commonly shared by individuals who used computers and by hardware manufacturers who welcomed the fact that people were making software that made their hardware useful. Organizations of users and suppliers, for example, SHARE, were formed to facilitate exchange of software. By the late 1960s, the picture changed: software costs were dramatically increasing, a growing software industry was competing with the hardware manufacturer's bundled software products (free in that the cost was included in the hardware cost), leased machines required software support while providing no revenue for software, and some customers able to better meet their own needs did not want the costs of "free" software bundled with hardware product costs. In United States vs. IBM, filed January 17, 1969, the government charged that bundled software was anticompetitive.^[7] While some software might always be free, there would be a growing amount of software that was for sale only. In the 1970s and early 1980s, the software industry began using technical measures (such as only distributing binary copiesof computer programs) to prevent computer users from being able to study and modify software. In 1980 copyright law was extended to computer programs.

In 1983, Richard Stallman, longtime member of the hacker community at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, announced the GNU project, saying that he had become frustrated with the effects of the change in culture of the computer industry and its users. Software development for the GNU operating system began in January 1984, and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) was founded in October 1985. He developed a free software definition and the concept of "copyleft", designed to ensure software freedom for all.

The economic viability of free software has been recognized by large corporations such as IBM, Red Hat, and Sun Microsystems. Many companies whose core business is not in the IT sector choose free software for their Internet information and sales sites, due to the lower initial capital investment and ability to freely customize the application packages. Also, some non-software industries are beginning to use techniques similar to those used in free software development for their research and development process; scientists, for example, are looking towards more open development processes, and hardware such as microchips are beginning to be developed with specifications released under copyleft licenses (see the OpenCores project, for instance). Creative Commons and the free culture movement have also been largely influenced by the free software movement.

What do you think about free software is beneficial or even detrimental?

Free software licenses

• the GNU General Public License
• the GNU Lesser General Public License
• the BSD License
• the Mozilla Public License
• the MIT License
• the Apache License

Source : wikipedia, GNU, FSF, Apache, Open Source, Mozilla