[WorldMaker]

Also, from the 2020 perspective Microsoft seems to have been right that the browser is an important operating system feature/component and may have simply been ahead of the curve in realizing it. (Today's mobile OSes all make the case that it should be a tightly OS managed component. Most consumers today would be extremely confused if an OS didn't include a browser at all; whether or not they primarily use that browser to install a more preferred browser.) It's easy in 2020 to wonder if the Microsoft anti-trust effort delayed innovations like PWA standards and got in the way of people thinking to build earlier cross-platform, lighter weight HTML "app frameworks" than what we are seeing in this timeline with Electron.

[megablast]

There is 0 reason why help and file browsing needs to be part of a browser. MS forced IE deep into the OS, when firefox and chrome, two incredibly successful and popular browsers do not need this at all, and are better for it.

[WorldMaker]

Base FTP/Gopher/WebDAV "file browsing" was at the time definitely seen as a common browser feature. It was much lamented when Firefox dropped those features and left them to be plugins/external applications.

Most "help" is just webpages or ebooks today. All Microsoft did with "HTML Help" was essentially a very early version of EPUB.

I think these are very strange things to complain about.

[nodamage]

I tend to agree. I think if the case had continued in court, Microsoft would have won this particular argument.

(Of course, they still would have lost on the other claims involving more egregious behavior.)

[WorldMaker]

I'm not sure about some of the other claims either.

The AntiVirus claims set Windows virus/malware safety back by like a decade. Needing to install Security Essentials into XP/Vista instead of it just being out-of-the-box probably cost a lot more dollars to Windows users than if the court had agreed that such security concerns were the domain of the operating system.

The PDF claims that Office shouldn't be allowed to directly export to PDF because that was the domain of paid add-ins also seem silly from 2020.

[Qwertious]

The browser primarily exists to address Windows's deficiencies in smooth package management for installing basic apps - that is, for "downloading" basic "webpages" - by simply clicking on the link.

Counterfactual are hard, but if you see browsers as a sort of "replacement OS as desktop application" then you can see why more competition among OSes would result in the browser being LESS important, not more!

[WorldMaker]

I find your viewpoint rather confusing and I'm not sure I see it at all. The browser primarily exists to traverse hyperlinked documents on the internet, which we call the "web". Though we've built plenty of "apps" now on top of hyperlinked documents, for the most part that remains arguably a secondary or tertiary reason for the browser to exist, and even if you could argue that secondary usage has rose to prominence to eclipse the primary reason for the existence of the browser, the use of the web for "apps" certainly has a lot less to do with Windows package management specifically and instead the convenience of simple, standardized client-server communications and development patterns that arise from that original primary usage goal of hyperlinked documents in a web of servers.

Web "apps" seem to only increase cross-platform interests, rather than serve to "smooth deficiencies" in a single platform.

> you can see why more competition among OSes would result in the browser being LESS important, not more!

We've seen exactly the opposite in practice: a ton of web "app" innovation occurred when there were a variety mobile "smartphone" OSes with reasonably modern browsers whereas development has shifted much further back to OS-specific apps as mobile devices have calcified into the iOS/Android duopoly.

[satyrnein]

Or consider Chrome OS, which is not much else beyond a browser.