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Dominate the market: “impersonate” the market leader

Posted by John Lampard on Monday, 15 September, 2008 to the technology subset

Does the secret of Microsoft’s domination of the web browser market lie in its use of Internet Explorer’s user agent string?

And so Microsoft made their own web browser, which they called Internet Explorer, hoping for it to be a “Netscape Killer”. And Internet Explorer supported frames, and yet was not Mozilla, and so was not given frames. And Microsoft grew impatient, and did not wish to wait for webmasters to learn of IE and begin to send it frames, and so Internet Explorer declared that it was “Mozilla compatible” and began to impersonate Netscape, and called itself Mozilla/1.22 (compatible; MSIE 2.0; Windows 95), and Internet Explorer received frames, and all of Microsoft was happy, but webmasters were confused.

Not quite a case of “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”, or is it?

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