[brudgers]

What is more believable is that spell check in the browser is somewhat of an edge case relative to general browser usage (i.e. web consumption) which Microsoft was historically able to address by allowing plug-ins. They rolled it into the development of their plug-inless browser and rolled their plug-inless browser into their not quite so backward compatible OS release.

I suspect that the corporate interests have long known that IE is not a sales critical feature.