Comment by chollida1

Comment by chollida1 a day ago

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> As a part of the cutthroat competition, Microsoft decided to revise the SSL 2 protocol with some additions of their own, and specified a protocol called "PCT" that was derived from SSL 2. It was only supported in IE and IIS.

> Netscape also wanted to address SSL 2 issues, but wasn't going to let Microsoft take leadership/ownership in the standard, so they developed SSL 3.0, which was a more significant departure.

I remember this moment and this is where I realized that Microsoft wasn't always the bad guy here. They had the better implementation and were willing to share it. But Netscape in this instance acted like kids and wouldn't cooperate at all. Which is why this meeting had to occur and by that point it was clear Netscape had lost the browser and it wasn't going to be close.

Hence the quick about face by Netscape to accept what was pretty much Microsoft's proposed solution.

I can't speak to the rest of Microsoft's browser decisions and given the court ruling it's clear they weren't the good guys either but this opened my eyes to the fact that all companies are the bad guys some time:)

thayne a day ago

Forcing the name to be chnaged from SSL to TLS seems pretty petty to me.

Two decades later, and it is still common for people to call TLS SSL.

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TZubiri a day ago

Microsoft was the bad guy in a movie where you have a war right before aliens invade and you figure out that there's bigger enemies.

FSF hated Microsoft because they released binaries without source code, they were THE enemy, nowadays, you are lucky if you get a binary to study and modify! The standard from any competitive developer is to hide the binary and source behind a server. Try to study and modify that!

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  • II2II a day ago

    For the FSF, Microsoft releasing binaries without source was reason enough to hat them but it was not the only reason why people, including those in the FSF, hated them. Microsoft was very much a company that used their dominant market position to lock customers in and the competition out. (Remember embraced, extend, extinguish?) The Microsoft of today looks like a cuddly teddy bear in comparision.

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    • esafak a day ago

      Microsoft's motto then was "We set the standards".

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      • stinkbeetle 2 hours ago

        Worse, it was "we set the standards, and you can't use them".

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  • [removed] 2 hours ago
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  • simfree a day ago

    Flaky, unreliable, not web standards compliant, hosted services suck to deal with.

    Who needs to add a CORS header to allow Sentry.io or Cloudflare's metrics to work on this 2014 era SaaS that the developer has wandered away from?

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  • Nursie a day ago

    > FSF hated Microsoft because they released binaries without source code

    I think that's a bit of an oversimplification - FOSS-leaning people had a pretty large set of reasons to dislike and distrust MS back then. "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" was a big one, calling linux/FOSS a cancer, their money and influence being used to fund the whole SCO debacle amongst other things. They were pretty actively evil, not just "closed source".

    There was very good reason not to let MS gain de-facto control of an open protocol, because 90s and 00s microsoft would not have hesitated to find ways to use that dominance to screw the competition.

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rendx a day ago

> But Netscape in this instance acted like kids

Oh, please.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft

The "velvet sweatshop" one is sufficient, but plenty of others to choose from. Don't have a source at hand but I remember it was known for its "work 3 years there and then you need to retire early from burnout" culture. There's also a really good (and highly depressing) 2001 German documentary around that "feature" called "Leben nach Microsoft" (Life after Microsoft).

And the classic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microserfs

There was really less than zero reason to trust M$ in the 90s and early 00s.

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  • Dylan16807 20 hours ago

    You quoted "in this instance" and then cited completely unrelated problems?

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    • rendx 16 hours ago

      When a company repeatedly demonstrates a pattern of embracing, extending, and extinguishing standards (see: Java, Kerberos, HTML), it’s fair to view any technical move with suspicion - even if the particular proposal seems technically sound. It’s easy to retroactively view Netscape’s resistance as petty, but the power imbalance was real, and the fear of Microsoft co-opting the standard wasn’t paranoia.

      Some companies make abuse a business model. I don't see how anyone can defend a position where they only look at isolated actions of a company and not their overall strategic positioning. There are boundaries. Ethical boundaries. If you never experience the consequences of your actions, if nobody ever objects to your behavior, you will not stop. Especially not a distributed organism of a company, which has no inherent ethical boundaries; its boundaries are those that affect business, so you need to teach them in business. If your business model is based on treating your own employees like slaves, it is you who is cancer, not the other.

      Calling that “kid-like behavior” is misguided on two levels. First, as noted, Netscape’s actions were arguably rational in context - pushing back against a powerful incumbent trying to steer an open standard toward a proprietary implementation.

      Second, the phrase itself leans on a dismissive and inaccurate stereotype. Kids aren’t inherently irrational or overly emotional; in fact, there’s substantial research showing that young people behave quite logically given their environment. Framing behavior this way isn’t just lazy; it reinforces the kind of condescension that later gets labeled as “adverse childhood experiences” in therapy, assuming someone even gets the chance to unpack and not replicate it.

      On both levels, it is DARVO.

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