[randomdata]

But was the browser monoculture to blame?

The web went through a painful stale period from about 2000 to 2005, during which time IE asserted near total dominance. However, sites are just now starting to phase out IE6 support. That means that the technology that has advanced the web over the past five or so years was there all along.

Interest in the web started to return around the same time Firefox started to gain in fanfare, but why? Was Firefox to thank? Those "Web 2.0" apps could have just as easily been developed in IE6 in 2001. It wasn't the technology that Firefox brought that made the difference.

[yuhong]

>However, sites are just now starting to phase out IE6 support.

All this proves is that the IE6 monoculture had such an effect that it took a long time for the effects to disappear. But yes IE4 and particularly IE5.x introduced a lot of new stuff that did not become well known until years later, like the infamous XMLHTTPRequest.

[drivebyacct2]

Even if you don't want to blame generic "browser monoculture", I see no problem in blaming the stagnation of "the web" on Internet Explorer. They had no interest in pushing the web forward, they had no innovative ideas for how web technologies could or would evolve. Shit, IE6 barely satisfied any reasonable expectations of a web browser from a "web specs" perspective. Chrome and Mozilla have pushed IE to become better and in the meantime, they are investing in new technologies CSS3, WebGl, Web Workers, Web Intents, Server Sent Events, (I shouldn't mention it, but) NaCl, etc. These are all initiatives started by Google and Mozilla to make the web a richer platform. Those probably wouldn't happen in a "browser monoculture" and they certainly wouldn't happen in an "IE only culture".