Oracle PowerBrowser

» see oracle.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

In 1996 there was no modem in our house in Turkey yet, so that year's browser war reached me later and secondhand. Even for people who were online that year this one was close to invisible. PowerBrowser was not sold to the public, it was aimed at the corporate intranet, and Oracle's pitch for it was a programming language rather than a page.

The announcement went out from Redwood Shores on 18 June 1996. PowerBrowser 1.5 was, in Oracle's words, the first browser on the market to support both Java and Basic scripting, and the quote in the release is worth keeping: while the rest of the browser industry fought a language battle, said Oracle's Jeff Menz, millions of developers already knew Basic. The argument was that a company building an intranet should not have to retrain anybody to make a web page do something.

Underneath that was a genuinely strange product. PowerBrowser shipped a drag-and-drop web server called Personal Server, so the browser on your desk could also publish from your desk. A Database Wizard walked the user through three steps to turn an Oracle table, or anything reachable over ODBC, into a web application. Third-party extensions were supported under the name Network Loadable Objects, deliberately compatible with Netscape 2.0 plug-ins, and the whole thing did SSL 2.0 and 3.0, which was still a selling point then.

It was also free, which in 1996 was the only price a browser could have, and Oracle would rebrand it for corporate customers who wanted their own client with their own name on it. Macintosh and UNIX versions were promised to follow the Windows ones, and neither of them shipped.

~ the chronicle ~

~ basic against java ~

The language argument dates the product more exactly than anything else in it. In mid 1996 nobody knew which language the web would be programmed in, and Oracle's bet was that the answer would be whatever the enterprise already had, which meant Visual Basic developers writing scripts inside web pages. Microsoft made the same bet with VBScript and had the advantage of owning the operating system those developers worked on.

The web went to JavaScript, which neither company had planned for. Oracle's version of Basic in the browser left no trace at all, while Microsoft's survived inside corporate intranets for another fifteen years, propped up by Internet Explorer's monopoly in exactly the buildings PowerBrowser had been designed for.

~ the personal server ~

The Personal Server is the idea worth rescuing. The assumption behind it was that reading and publishing are the same activity. The machine that displays a page should be able to serve one, and an office worker should be able to put a document on the network by dragging it. Netscape put an editor inside the browser with Composer, and the original WorldWideWeb program on a NeXT had been an editor from the first day. Every mainstream browser since has dropped it. What you get instead is an upload button pointing at somebody else's server.

~ where the browser went ~

PowerBrowser's recorded cause of death is speed. It was slow, and nothing in the record suggests it was ever adopted outside a few corporate pilots. After that the trail stops. The last build anyone archived is 1.5.04, no announcement of any kind was published, and by April 1999 the page for it on oracle.com answered 404.

The better answer is that Oracle bought its way out of browser development. Netscape had spun off a unit called Navio in August 1996 to put browsers on televisions and set-top boxes; in May 1997 Oracle announced that its own Network Computer subsidiary would merge with it, and the deal completed that August under the NCI name. The browser Larry Ellison's network computer ran was called NC Navigator, and it came from Netscape's codebase rather than Oracle's. Oracle ended up owning Java itself in 2010, when it bought Sun.

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