Note 58: the battle of the titans

Rubric: Our networks

The battle of the titans

Anton Nosik

Today we promised to talk about two “three -tires” that came out with an interval of a week: “peeps” Netscape Navigator 3.0 and Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0. In the past, we have repeatedly happened to talk about these two programs and about their rivalry, which began after the first “beta” of the third version of the Explorer (3.0beta1) at the beginning of this summer. Prior to this beta, the explorer did not represent any serious competition between Netskaipu: the Microsoft “peeped”, included in the official release of the 95th “windows”, did not really support the tables, no fonts, or logical colors (for letters and background of the pages), nor graphic GIF89A files, nor commands of the meter, no longer mention Java, Javascript or very popular "framework" - Frames. Prior to the release of the first summer, the third version of the third version, Explorar remained a quite shameful head in the history of the world's largest programmatic company.

Netskope, meanwhile, reached its peak to the release of the official release of version 2.0, that is, by the middle of this winter. By that time, support for all existing HTML language commands, specification from 1.0 to 3.0, as well as many teams that were not contained in the official set of HTML, although the authors and visitors of the home pages had taken them with great enthusiasm were included in Netskaype. In addition, Netskaip’s installation package, starting with the official release of version 1.22 (that is, since last fall), included e -mail customers and Internet public conferences (Netscape News), which was not necessary to dream about users of the explosor. It is not surprising that 10 months after the start of the free distribution of the explorer as part of the installation package of Windows 95 (today about 30 million copies of this operating system have been sold), the Microsoft “peep” belonged to 5-6% of the total programs in its category.

Alfa of the third version of the Explorer last winter did not change anything in this situation. In any case, in favor of Microsoft. With the advent of this version - however, not too advertised - many had the impression that the world's largest programming company decided to simply prove its inability to make a decent Internet program again. Netskayip, meanwhile, promised the golden mountains and made up for the possibility of supporting color and frames that were absent in the second version, and also learned to understand and show AVI (In-Line Video) using the prefix installation. In addition, Netskayip added to the standard package quite advanced national support tools, including the ability to select three Russian encodings from the Options menu-CP1251, KOI8 and ISO-8859-5. True, the addition was purely nominal in nature: the points in the menu were entered, and thereby limited themselves. Support as such (in particular, for META instructions that allow you to automatically switch the document into any national encoding) remained in its infancy.

Further, the situation turned over: Netskayip complained about the laurels complacently, stopping generally developing in any direction, and Microsoft decided to catch up with everything that was still missed in the design of his peepers. The result was stunning: this summer, the explorer completely caught up with Netskaype for all the possibilities of viewing home pages. In the official release of the third version of the Explorer, released on August 12, there is support for absolutely everything that was the second version: for Java, Java Script, tables, Frames frames, multipliers GIF89A, logical font styles and flowers, and even for the first time - there was an opportunity to change pea fonts, depending on national coding.

Along the way, the post -mail and Internet and Internet News were added to the explorer, who are quite nice in design and in appearance not inferior to similar Netskymic prefixes. Of course, for Windows and Macintosh users, this is far from a reason to abandon programs such as Eudora or Free Agent for reading mail and news, respectively. However, users Netscape Mail and Netscape News can switch to Mycrosoft analogues without losses. The main achievement of Microsoft Mail I would call the introduction of rules for mail sorting (Mail Rules). These rules allow you to automatically lay out all the incoming mail to different folders - it is very useful for those users who receive personal correspondence, letters from postal conferences and some periodic ballots to the same address.

National support in Explorer 3.0 also advanced quite far: the choice of the Russian symbolic table we need (with the installed software support of the Russian language) can be carried out even without entering the menu window, using a special button in the lower lower corner of the main peeping window.

In addition to all these successes, Explorer now supports the Activex super -fashioned Microsoft technology, which fans of small -laws promise to make a common platform for erasing faces between the Internet and the user's home computer. Netskayip has not yet nominated any counter proposals on this subject.

How will the rivalry of two giants of the observation industry develop further? It seems boring. For both Netskayp and Explorer have reached the level today, after which all new properties and capabilities are already under the article "Basis" and "Navorota". All HTML Teams of the First Technics are already implemented. You can confidently predict that the third versions of both views entering the market in this August can be quite safe to use to view all home pages of the 2000. Therefore, people for whom WWW are not a specialty, there is no particular sense to follow the release of the following versions. Neither Mycrosoft nor the Netscape corporation in the foreseeable future will be breeded. The war that had begun in the press between the two corporations, which had begun in the press, can serve as unnecessary evidence. The exchange of abuse and accusations serves as evidence that neither party can offer more significant arguments in favor of their products today.

In conclusion, we recall those who have not yet learned this: the latest version of the explorer can be unloaded at http://www.microsoft.com/ie/edl.htm. The latest version of Netskaip (both simple and “gold”) can be unloaded at http://home.netscape.com/comprod/mirror/. Or directly to FTP from the server ftp.netscape.com, from the directory /pub/navigator/3.0.

In the next issue, a story about USENET groups, a note about Scott Pakin, the author of an “idiot”, and - through this topic - a journey into the bowels of the Altavists.