Microsoft has made some minor noises about eliminating the browser icon from subsequent versions of Windows. But this isn’t really much more than an empty gesture: at this juncture, browsing technology is firmly embedded so deeply into Windows that you couldn’t remove it without crashing your system. And anyway, who would want to? We all use Internet Explorer anyway, and have learned to live with its quirks (Active X) and oddities (a space in a URL brings up an error, a space in the same window when I am browsing my hard disk is acceptable). Who cares about Netscape’s browser? It is so Novell, so 1994. You might as well bring back DOS.

But Netscape has been transformed into what is now called AOL Time Warner, and it is a formidable competitor to Microsoft.

You can read the entire essay here.