Charles Cooper has written a nice spew about what the world would be like if Netscape hadn't lost the browser war.

I think his view is rather naïve, at best.

Section-by-section rebuttal:

Windows RIP

A non-Microsoft browser would not have spelled the end of Microsoft. What keeps Microsoft going isn't IE, but Office. Everyone sticks with Windows because of Word (and because they're afraid of compatability with other platforms), not because of the latest browser technologies.

Case in point: My mom wants a Mac. She's always impressed by the simplicity and elegance of my iBook, and at the relative cost-benefit ratio of it over Windows notebooks. However, she doesn't want to buy Office.X, and doesn't trust any of the workalikes or convertors. I don't blame her.

A truly cool browser

Not necessarily. Netscape wasn't particularly "cool" when it was closed-source proprietary stuff and in direct competition with IE. All of the sexy stuff which has come about as part of Netscape (such as XUL) were part of the big opensource wankfest. All of the truly cool stuff (such as tabbed browsing) came about in other browsers (many of them based on Gecko, which is, of course, post-opensource) and then brought back into Mozilla. And even then, who actually runs (and enjoys) Mozilla? Everyone I know uses the offshoots, such as Galeon, Phoenix, Chimera or even Skipstone, because they take Gecko (which is pretty damn good) and put a decent interface on top of it. Mozilla itself is a pain to work with.

A new set of tech gurus

A total non-sequitur. People hang off of Bill Gates because he presents the air of a playful nerd who happened to make it very big, and has a sort of humble nature (at least, in the way he presents himself, not necessarily in the way he actually acts). He's a perfect poster child for the media. It's only incidental that he's a multi-billionaire.

I don't know why he brought up Chris Hassett. I'd never even heard the name before, even when Pointcast was still in existence. Pointcast was based on buzzwords ("push technology" and "synergy" and so on), not on anything truly remarkable.

The end of the PC

I wonder if the author realizes that Microsoft owns WebTV, which is a box which is designed specifically to be an Internet appliance, as an embedded browser using the web as middleware for everything. I wonder if he realizes that nobody likes WebTV because it doesn't really do anything; you can browse the web, but you can't do anything useful with it (like write a letter to your grandma who doesn't have or want email).

"The web as middleware" is a great idea (and it's something I've entertained in the past, and have rambled about at great length on K5 and ShouldExist) but it doesn't, by any means, end the PC. It just changes the interface to it. A web browser just doesn't work for a lot of stuff, like editing movies, playing games (flash and Java are cute, but no gaming platform), writing letters and resumes (you'd have people put raw HTML into a text box?), or listening to music. It's good for simple stateless interactions between a user and "the Internet," but for any serious work, you're going to run into major limitations.

Also, he seems to only be speaking of the death of Windows, not the death of PCs, citing "open source" as a nice reason. Too bad Netscape wasn't opensourced until well after (and, in fact, because) it lost the browser war.