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0 pointsalasdair_5y ago0 comments

If the people that make the OS whose APIs you are reliant on, are also the ones trying to make your code crash, I'd bet most of us would end up with crashing code.

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3 comments · 1 top-level

WalterBright5y ago· 2 in thread

I've never heard of any evidence that Microsoft planted:

    if (NetscapeIsRunning()) corrupt_data();

in their OS API calls. If they had, I'm sure it would have come out at the anti-trust trial, and would have made it an open and shut case. Did that happen?

As I recall, the anti-trust case revolved around Microsoft including IE for free with Windows, not sabotage. (Of course, every OS comes with a free browser these days. Even my Kindle.)

michaelt5y ago

The claim by tinus_hn is that FrontPage - Microsoft's HTML editing tool - created pages that crash Netscape.

While it would arguably be Netscape's fault if Netscape actually crashes (rather than simply failing to display a malformed input) at that time in the browser wars there were plenty of energy going into creating incompatible new 'features' - such as Microsoft's own JavaScript competitor, VBScript [1], vector imaging format (AutoShapes) and animation tags (DHTML)

And Microsoft did intentionally sabotage competitors products in the 1990s with approval from the highest levels of the business - such as DR-DOS [2].

So while I'm not aware of any claims Microsoft sabotaged the OS to make Netscape crash, they'd sabotaged the OS to make other competing products crash, and they certainly added a lot of 'features' so web pages wouldn't render right on Netscape.

[1] http://www.gbengasesan.com/fyp/43/ch5.htm [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code

WalterBright5y ago

I know about the AARD episode, and Microsoft lost a lawsuit over it, which was the right result.

There's zero evidence Microsoft sabotaged Netflix.

There's zero evidence Netscape crashed for any reason other than buggy Netflix code. Making a web page that crashes Netflix is a bug in Netflix. Microsoft is under zero obligation to work around Netflix bugs.

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