DNS over HTTPS in Firefox

Yeah, Microsoft was copying AOL's playbook and setting up their own walled garden, MSN, making deals with all kinds of potential content providers. But before it really got going they saw that the Web would swamp them and pivoted to focusing on Internet Explorer, cancelling all those deals overnight.

You were probably being sarcastic but if Microsoft had crushed the Web with their own platform through MSN or later WPF/Avalon, our situation today would be very different and probably a lot worse. Mozilla saved the day, with generous help from Bill Gates's blunders.

The Microsoft Network wasn't the Internet, quite deliberately. It was a walled garden. It's very important in a walled garden not to show the "customers" trapped inside your garden that there _is_ an outside, because of the grass-is-greener phenomenon. After all, if there's an outside, who is to say there aren't better things out there than in here? And once they start thinking that the jig is very much up. Several walled gardens existed, Microsoft's was probably the last to launch, AOL and Compuserve were more notable and longer-lived (as walled gardens anyway).

By 1996 MSN had become a web-based interactive media site although "MSN Classic", the above walled garden, survived until 1998, increasingly shrivelled and unmaintained and "MSN Dial-up", the service you paid for that was no longer the walled garden, survives to this day if you still want dial-up Internet access for some reason. By the turn of the century "MSN" meant a web site Microsoft owned, msn.com, that was a "web portal" when that was a thing, which if you're over sixty maybe it still is.

It's amazing to me that in 1995 there was (some) executive cover for MSN at Microsoft. Not just because Netscape Navigator 1.0 is from 1994, but because the Internet itself is clearly unstoppable by that point. In 1989 the Internet is dominant but perhaps not unstoppable, in the US a lot of systems are using IP, but JaNET is still an X.25 network, and many countries have little or no multi-institutional networking above bulletin-board type systems. By 1992 that's all over, "experimental" Internet service for JaNET dwarfs the "official" X.25 network it was created to run, countries with little English penetration are maintaining non-IP systems they've already built, but there is absolutely no demand for any new non-IP systems. There is a thriving cottage industry of filing the serial numbers off the Berkeley TCP/IP implementation and pasting it into other software to interoperate.

There seems to have been some conceit at Microsoft that MSN could co-exist with the Internet, rather than one or the other being extinguished. That never made any sense at all. The only reason to have MSN at all was if you were sure you could extinguish the Internet and sell MSN instead, and that didn't pass the laugh test by 1995.

> > There never was any "contract" that a Web page is a static "document", and if there had been, it was lost when JS was enabled by default in Netscape 2 in 1995.

> You *know* that this is a very lopsided view of things. The Web is still degrading now, and the most important part of the slope started about five to seven years ago. Before, there always was a talk of "graceful degradation", but taking away the controls from users is just doing the rest. So yes, there were remnants of that contract there.

The broken contract I really miss is that it is down to the *receiver* *device* to control the formatting, such that what appears on the screen and what appears on the printer and what appears on whatever other device the user may have ... I'm just totally fed up with a "simple" web page in the browser turning into 30 or 40 pages on the printer, many with just one giant letter on them, and the information that I really wanted that was clearly visible on screen doesn't even print!!!

Cheers,
Wol