This website is optimized for Netscape Navigator 3.0.

If Netscape Navigator 3.0 hadn’t died, it’d be 22 years old this summer! 🎉

The Browser War was serious business. A cautionary tale for today’s young browsers.

BTW, kind of wish we’d all settled on a better word than “browser”. It reminds me of eyebrows.

I believe that we’re seeing the beginnings of Browser War II. Google Chrome is starting to remind me of Windows 95.

And yes: Eye Browsers 😊

Now that I’m thinking about it, I don’t really understand the whole browser war thing. They’re all free. What’s the benefit to the browser companies?

This may sound like a leap at first but it’s about building moats around the castle.

As an example: Gmail works best in Chrome. Having people use Chrome then keeps people using Gmail. Same goes for YouTube.

Vendors with something to loose give away browsers (or whatever) to keep people visiting/using their websites (or services). Once people are locked in they tend to keep using those same services rather than trying something new.

And then Vimeo and Hotmail wither on the vine while Google’s castle is hustlin and bustlin.

Companies are very protective of their websites.

As another example, when I post something good directly on Facebook I’ll get tons of enagagement. If I post it here then link to it from FB, I might see a quarter or maybe even zero engagement on Facebook. I suspicion, since the latter contains a link away from FB, they tend not to show that post as much to my friends and followers.

Facebook didn’t do away with chronological timelines because that’s what people wanted. They did it so they could control the flow of information. Just like Google, they want people to stay within their castle.

This topic also speaks to why every social media site has a free stand-alone mobile app. Click a link to a third party website? They keep you in the app instead of open the default web browser …and that makes it much harder for you to leave.

I could go on and on. 😊

That totally makes sense, and I’ve heard that before about Facebook not showing posts with links. I really hate the apps that open websites in the same app. The site never works properly. I always click “open in browser” immediately on principle.

Yep, me too. The worst part of the in-app browsers is that they typically don’t share cookies, etc. with the default browser. Meaning, you’re signed-in to a website with Chrome and then not when browsing in the FB in-app browser. It’s total anarchy.

There is one slightly embarrassing exception where I do like the FB app browser. Sometimes when I just want mindless entertainment, I do click on some of the stupid clickbait articles (yeah I know FB is probably enjoying the tracking info), but the thing with those articles is that in the real browser they’re split across like 5 ad-filled pages, and in the FB browser it’s all on one page and the ads tend to fail to load. It’s probably a deal between FB and Postize.

Ah… Using FB to do your clickbait bidding.

Good work 👍

FB closed my clickbait loophole!! Have you had any readers from California in the past few days? 🤔

Haha! I bet FB crawls the Internet just as much as Google does.