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Windows Gets Webbed

Microsoft puts browser in Win95 and NT
By John Swenson
Issue date: March 25, 1996

Microsoft is serious about the Internet. How serious? It plans to make its World Wide Web browser a standard part of the Windows operating system.

At a Microsoft Internet developers conference two weeks ago in San Francisco, the company demonstrated the integrated browser it will release this fall in an Internet add-on pack for Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0. The add-on pack, code-named Nashville, wi ll integrate Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browser with the Windows 95 interface, which by then will also be part of Windows NT. The pack will cost about $50 and will feature the integrated browser, which Microsoft is merging with the Explorer and My Computer file-manager applications in Windows 95.

From a single window, users will be able to view files on their hard drive, floppy drive, or network, as well as browse an intranet or Internet Web pages. "We want to have a common navigational paradigm that works across all these important sources of information," says Paul Maritz, Microsoft's group VP in charge of platforms.

"Microsoft's opinion is that there won't be a browser in a year or two," says David Card, an operating systems analyst in International Data Corp.'s Mountain View, Calif., office.

Software companies that market standalone Web browsers may be hurt. "Why would you want another browser if the desktop does everything for you?" asks Cl ay Ryder, an analyst who tracks the Internet for Zona Research in Redwood City, Calif. Indeed, an Internet developer at a San Francisco bank who requested anonymity says if Windows came with a good integrated browser, his IS team probably wouldn't want a browser from another vendor, even if it were free.

Merging browser technology with the operating system is a logical idea that should benefit most users, says Rob Enderle, a senior analyst at the Giga Information Group, in Santa Clara, Calif. "It looks like the right thing to do."

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