[Throw839]

> often wonder how technology would look today if Netscape hadn’t been crushed for threatening Microsoft’s os dominance

> technologies went through a dark age without innovation until Chrome

IE was pretty innovative, it introduced AJAX (async javascript requests...), web version of Outlook in 1998...

There was also Opera browser, pretty innovative, it introduced tabs, mouse gestures, user styles, no script, basic adblocking... It could run on anything, even phone without MMU.

[sedatk]

Besides AJAX, IE introduced CSS and IFRAMEs too as far as I remember.

[fnordpiglet]

There were already competing things in these areas already. They were the ultimate standardizations, but the momentum was already there and something would have standardized. It happened that after crushing Netscape no one bothered to develop the alternatives. I’d note that all of these emerged while Netscape was still a viable business delivering those alternatives. I look at the gap after AJAX and notice nothing really comes along until almost a decade later.