alt Hacker News> As a part of the cutthroat competition, Microsoft decided to revise the SSL 2 protocol with some additions of their own, and specified a protocol called "PCT" that was derived from SSL 2. It was only supported in IE and IIS.
> Netscape also wanted to address SSL 2 issues, but wasn't going to let Microsoft take leadership/ownership in the standard, so they developed SSL 3.0, which was a more significant departure.
I remember this moment and this is where I realized that Microsoft wasn't always the bad guy here. They had the better implementation and were willing to share it. But Netscape in this instance acted like kids and wouldn't cooperate at all. Which is why this meeting had to occur and by that point it was clear Netscape had lost the browser and it wasn't going to be close.
Hence the quick about face by Netscape to accept what was pretty much Microsoft's proposed solution.
I can't speak to the rest of Microsoft's browser decisions and given the court ruling it's clear they weren't the good guys either but this opened my eyes to the fact that all companies are the bad guys some time:)
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Microsoft was the bad guy in a movie where you have a war right before aliens invade and you figure out that there's bigger enemies.
FSF hated Microsoft because they released binaries without source code, they were THE enemy, nowadays, you are lucky if you get a binary to study and modify! The standard from any competitive developer is to hide the binary and source behind a server. Try to study and modify that!
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice?
> But Netscape in this instance acted like kids
Oh, please.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft
The "velvet sweatshop" one is sufficient, but plenty of others to choose from. Don't have a source at hand but I remember it was known for its "work 3 years there and then you need to retire early from burnout" culture. There's also a really good (and highly depressing) 2001 German documentary around that "feature" called "Leben nach Microsoft" (Life after Microsoft).
And the classic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microserfs
There was really less than zero reason to trust M$ in the 90s and early 00s.
Forcing the name to be chnaged from SSL to TLS seems pretty petty to me.
Two decades later, and it is still common for people to call TLS SSL.