Belatedly, the browser war

Stuart Robinson, a few days ago, commented on Microsoft dropping Mac IE:

There was a time when Microsoft looked set to use ISS and IE to remake the web in their proprietory image. That time is over. HTML and HTTP are staying open. Mozilla and Apache need more respect for that.

Much as I love the lizard, I don’t think Mozilla deserves all that much of the credit here. The latest Google zeitgeist has non-IE browsers in numbers easily small enough to ignore. If Microsoft’s plot to embrace and extend the web has failed—which I agree that it has, so far—I think the credit goes to, in order:

1. Apache
2. Apache
3. Linux
4. php/perl/python
5. MySQL

Apache gets two votes, because, well, Apache rules. It is fast, flexible, secure, powerful, easy to configure, and easy to extend. And free as in speech, and free as in beer. And most importantly: ubiquitous. Without Apache, MS would own the web.

Linux, the p-langs, and MySQL get votes because they are the L,M and P in LAMP. LAMP makes it possible for any nerd with $10 in his pocket to have a sophisticated web presence (well, for a month). Even non-nerds with nerd friends or money they are willing to give to nerds can very quickly find themselves running a professional-seeming operation, with little startup cost; and the common platform means that they are not tied to a specific vendor or hosting provider—and that’s why it only costs $10, and not $100, for the nerd. Open systems make free markets, and free markets make innovation, and innovation makes better mousetraps, and better mousetraps kill more mice, and everyone hates mice, right?

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