It's all really a ploy by AOL to steal market from MS as usual.

[nfotxn]

Umm, why don't you just fix HTTP so it can authenticate and session securely instead of doing this? I mean "project liberty"? Come on! That's just as sappy as ".Net" 'cept in a patriotic rather than technofetishist way.

Wait, I'm gonna answer my own question. I think this just comes down to another AOL/Netscape vs. MS battle. I mean, they both control the pieces of software that probably make up the most HTTP traffic on the net. They could get the IETF to standardize something that works.

But standards don't make money. Oh well.

Comments

[cpratt.livejournal.com]

Are Netscape still relevant in any way whatsoever? While I was out of the country, it looks like there was another reorg and round of layoffs that left only the most irrelevant losers of them all still working at the company...

As regards standards, Netscape was only ever interested in them when their market share fell below 20%. Suddenly, they were very important to Netscape. Go figure.

[ranger1.livejournal.com]

They could get the IETF to standardize something that works.

They did - X.509 personal certificates over SSL. Nobody uses them -- or more precisely, no service provider wants to deal with the ickiness of making them available to their users.
(Not to put a damper on the Netscape-bashing, but back in the day Netscape were the first ones to implement X.509 and SSL in a browser and do it well. Microsoft didn't get it right until IE 5.5 and it's still pretty ugly.)

But standards don't make money.

Nor do they get widely adopted because of technical merit. Not unless somebody powerful gets behind the standard and pushes real hard. Or unless someone waves around a lot of money. Nobody paid much attention to Kerberos until Microsoft decide to "embrace and extend [and extinguish]" it. Firewire wouldn't have gone anywhere without Apple's incessant whoring marketing.