It's a funny situation, in the sense that Microsoft did exactly the same thing on the ECMAScript 4 standard on which Actionscript 3 is based and managed instead to stall the evolution of the ES standard...
Everyone focused on Microsoft at the time but Yahoo and others also dissented. I think for good reason; ES4 is nearly completely different from normal Javascript (static types, class-based inheritance).
Also Adobe was getting a standard that was what they already had and Mozilla had a AS3 VM runtime from Adobe. Microsoft would have been starting from scratch. I don't blame them for blocking it.
Also Adobe was getting a standard that was what they already had and Mozilla had a AS3 VM runtime from Adobe. Microsoft would have been starting from scratch. I don't blame them for blocking it.
(EDIT: If you look at this Apple also marked red to much of ES4: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pFIHldY_CkszsFxMkQORe...)