Web developers couldn’t stop talking about HTML and its evolution during the 1990s. New features were usually tempting, though not always workable, and the Browser Wars meant that vendors competed by providing and copying features. The HTML standardization process had its twists and turns, moving from the IETF to the W3C, developing standards that reflected immediate needs and tried to channel developer energy in more productive directions.

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Chrome is not going to replace Windows. A computer requires an operating system such as Windows, Apple’s OS X or Linux to make the machine work. It does, however, have the potential to do what Mr. Gates feared: make the choice of operating system less important.

So writes John Gapper, the fine columnist for The Financial Times in today’s paper. Chrome, of course, is Google’s new browser, which is pretty explicitly designed to be a Windows killer. As Mr. Gapper notes, that precise fear–that an Internet browser could become such a powerful platform for applications software that it would effectively take over the function of the operating system–is what caused Microsoft to start the browser wars in the 1990s, effectively putting Netscape out of business.

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