[tcmb]

> on another note, it seems silly to have both firefox and safari. perhaps there is some unificaiton strategy that we can get these two to pursue. combined, they certainly have enough marketshare to drive webmasters.

Was 2005 really such a different time with respect to monopolies that someone like Brin would actually think it's "silly" for more than one browser to have significant market share? Wasn't Microsoft punished also for bundling IE with Windows?

[ikawe]

The context here is that IE has absolutely dominated the browser market for years in 2005.

So I read it as “Given we’re trying to have an alternative to IE, it’s silly for us to further fracture the ecosystem, rather than collaborate on a viable contender.”

Wikipedia shows november 2005 browser share as 88% IE, firefox at 8%, and netscape+other at 2%. (not sure why this doesn’t add up to 100%)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

[markoman]

I suppose we have to assume that it wasn't Brin's idea to launch the Chrome browser 3 years later.