Tablets, laptops, and Chromebooks power Netscape’s unlikely revenge

Back in the previous century I attended a meeting with a brand-new Silicon Valley company called Netscape. They had a wicked cool browser that let you view text and images side by side on the Web (!), as well as a news reader, email software, and a bunch of Web creation tools. Even stranger, they were giving most of this stuff away for free.

Sitting across the table from me was a Netscape engineer who excitedly described the company’s vision of the future, one in which all machines would be connected to the Internet and anything anyone ever needed to do would be available inside their browser. The software would start up instantly, update itself automatically, and run for a decade on supercheap hardware — no more $500 office suites, no need for a fussy, unreliable operating system and a three-year upgrade cycle.

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I looked at him. “There’s this company up near Seattle called Microsoft,” I said. “Ever heard of them?”

The Netscape guys dismissed my skepticism. They knew they had history on their side. That is the moment when I knew Microsoft would crush Netscape like a bug, flush its lifeless husk down the toilet, and scrub the spot where its boot had landed so that not even a stain remained. Back then, when it came to PC operating systems, it was Microsoft’s way or the highway — period.

Of course it was even worse than that: A few years later a defeated Netscape allowed itself to be acquired by AOL. Now all that remains is this vestigial popup window for Netscape News found on the Compuserve.com website, like a wayward broadcast signal from the 1930s that bounces around the troposphere until it eventually finds it way to your car radio.

Why this trip down memory lane? Because I sit here now, playing with the Acer C7 Chromebook, a $200 machine that starts up instantly, updates automatically, runs hundreds of apps entirely inside a browser, and contains not a shred of Microsoft technology. It is, of course, running the Google Chrome OS, but it’s basically the computer that Netscape engineer described to me nearly 20 years ago.

This time, however, it’s in a crush-proof box. Because as much as Microsoft would like to, there’s no way it’s going to crush Google — not in what’s left of my lifetime anyway.

I’m not saying Chromebooks are the end-all, be-all for computing. You are, of course, stuck using the apps that work with Chrome. If you happen to lose your Wi-Fi connection, there’s a limited number of tasks you can perform on them — mostly just use the offline versions of Google Docs and Gmail. The 3-pound C7 appears to have about four hours of battery life in it, which means it won’t even last through a nonstop cross-country flight without a boost. You have to learn new ways of doing things, and if you’re someone who likes to dig into the innards of your software to tweak stuff, you’ll have a hard time getting there.

But for $200, it’s a pretty good deal. That’s half the cost of a copy of Office Professional 2013 or slightly less than an upgrade to Windows 8 plus a year’s subscription to Office 365. The bigger picture: It’s no longer Microsoft’s way or the highway.

Yesterday at Mobile World Congress 2013 Firefox announced its own OS for mobile devices, entering what has suddenly become a very crowded and competitive market. The difference between Firefox OS and Apple iOS, Android, Windows Mobile, and the Chrome OS? It’s an “open OS” based on HTML5, which means you aren’t forced to get all your apps from one place and one place only. And it’s free, developed by the not-for-profit Mozilla.org that emerged from the ashes of Netscape.

Mozilla hasn’t announced any plans to port the OS to tablets or laptoplike devices such as the Acer C7, but it’s not hard to imagine somebody doing just that.

This is all good, right? Not necessarily. OS wars can spur innovation, even in grouchy old dinosaurs like Microsoft. But they also make life more confusing for everyone — from end-users who have to learn multiple ways of doing the same thing to IT organizations that have to grapple with supporting different OSes and/or fighting off demands from users who want their cool new toys and want them now.

We’re seeing that with the iPad and BYOD in general. Throw Chromebooks and Foxbooks into the mix, and it gets even uglier even faster. There’s a reason why technology tends to favor monocultures and why Microsoft has ruled the roost for so long. It wasn’t thanks to superior technology.

It’s going to be an interesting few years before everything sorts out and the wannabe OSes fall by the wayside. For all we know, Microsoft could lose the battle for all mobile devices, not just phones; in three or four years, many of us could be carrying Foxbooks and Foxtabs.

Wouldn’t that be something? We could call it Netscape’s revenge.

Would you drop Windows (or Mac) for a Chrome or Firefox-based device? Why or why not? Share your OS insights below or email me: cringe@infoworld.com.

This article, “Tablets, laptops, and Chromebooks power Netscape’s unlikely revenge,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the crazy twists and turns of the tech industry with Robert X. Cringely’s Notes from the Field blog, and subscribe to Cringely’s Notes from the Underground newsletter.