[beavis2]

IE lost users because it was abysmal. And the reason for that was they wanted to keep people on the desktop.

Who knows... if IE was already as good as early Chrome, perhaps there would be no Chrome.

[tjoff]

IE 6 was superior in every way, there truly was no competition at the time.

Then they didn't bother to do anything for close to a decade and "suddenly" everyone had passed them.

Google on the other hand seems to be actively making things worse. Might not take so long time for chrome.

One can hope.

[beavis2]

Not really. IE's "killer feature" was ActiveX. Which meant that any browser limitation could be worked around.

But there was competition, that's why they made the original effort. Once the competition was killed, they stopped.

Sure, they wanted it to be the best browser - but not better than desktop.

[tjoff]

ActiveX wasn't really used outside of enterprises. It was also used for creating wave-effects on an image, cool stuff.

The desktop was never threatened, most people were on dialup. Javascript was about changing link colors, not creating "software".

Since IE was so much better than the competition it didn't really matter that it got monopoly. Until it stagnated. Same as today, since Chrome was so superior it didn't really matter that all other browsers faded into niches. Until google started abusing it.

Maybe we should start prioritizing open software rather than waiting for a monopoly to be formed?

The reason for why Fusion 360 is "free" isn't because autodesk are nice guys, it's because that's an effective way to ensure that they won't have to deal with competition in the future.

[dingle_thunk]

IE became abysmal because principled developers didn’t want to continue to work on it. It wasn’t always so.