[Shamanmuni]

> Please enlighten me on the ideas! concepts! Microsoft held back again and again that were not available on free software systems?

Are you joking? I'll just give you one example: IE 6 and its complete disregard for open standards, end-user security and its lack of change put the web in stasis for years. At first, it didn't make much difference that we had Firefox because developers still made their pages only compatible with Microsoft's non-compliant browser, which was understandable as most people used it. Since IE lost ground the web has become a much more open and welcoming space for experimentation and advancement of its technologies. And that's undeniable.

[throwawaykf05]

1. Letting IE stagnate is different from holding back "ideas! concepts!" because Firefox (free software) and Opera were still around to pick up the slack. Sure, it caused (and still does) a lot of pain to web developers to make cross-browser compatible webpages, but that's not the same as "holding back ideas".

2. Note also that vendor prefixes always were and are still a thing, so it's not just IE that had "non-compliant" features. Adding non-compliant features and then working them into the standards seems to be the natural way web technologies advance.

Especially with Opera in mind, I recall many new features being added to browsers regardless of IE's stagnation. Sure, they were not widely used because the then-dominant IE didn't have them, but that didn't prevent Opera and Firefox from adding them. So, unless you conflate "experimentation and advancement" with "widespread adoption", I would disagree that IE held back experimentation and advancement of web technologies.