I guess I just don't see a direct correlation between what happened with MS in the late '90s and how web technologies have evolved (or not evolved) after that. Who's to say things wouldn't have been as bad (or worse) without IE?
It's an imponderable, we'll never know the answer. You are extrapolating it out to a scenario where IE didn't exist, and Netscape, the standards organizations, and all the other key players were harmonious stewards of some sort of golden age.
I'm not saying that I support anything that Microsoft did in the '90s, rather that it is totally plausible to me that the players in the no-IE parallel universe were perfectly capable of screwing things up just as badly or worse. Since it's extrapolation, what's plausible to us says more about how we feel about the different players than anything else.
It wasn't so much IE in itself but the IE/Frontpage/ActiveX trinity they managed to make synonymous with enterprise for a while. It was a nasty time to work in the Internet space, especially for a web developer.
They did a lot of other strange things as well. I know Microsoft people showed up to at least one IETF working group pretending to be interested in doing standards work, only to return later having patented key points of the standard, saying they weren't interested anymore.
So IE was just a small part of that famous strategy, even if it was a central piece. But the bundling was never much of an issue unless you were a direct competitor. The only reason that's what people remember is the court case was widely reported in media at the time.
I agree with you. Netscape (4.0 iirc) was a horrible piece of software. MS originally went off on its own with IE because the standards bodies were so slow. It wasn't embrace and extend so much as it was ship working software. XML/XSL transformer in the browser, IE had that. Invention of AJAX, yep, IE also.
The problem was the combination of IE6 (at the time, the best browser out there) and MS business tactics simply crushed everyone else. At that point MS decided to work on other things and let IE waste.
Then Firefox amd Safari arose, and it didn't really work out well for Microsoft. I mean, I see that as Microsoft's mistake, not them setting the market back. And what if microsoft did keep pushing on IE at the time? Things might have been worse off now for it.
It's an imponderable, we'll never know the answer. You are extrapolating it out to a scenario where IE didn't exist, and Netscape, the standards organizations, and all the other key players were harmonious stewards of some sort of golden age.
I'm not saying that I support anything that Microsoft did in the '90s, rather that it is totally plausible to me that the players in the no-IE parallel universe were perfectly capable of screwing things up just as badly or worse. Since it's extrapolation, what's plausible to us says more about how we feel about the different players than anything else.