[saranagati]

this is a very narrow minded view. microsoft began creating plugins for utilities that did not follow web standards such as activex that would integrate the browser with the operating system. on top of them being horribly flawed with security bugs, these plugins would then only work for ie. microsoft then pushed people creating web content to use these non-standard plugins in their site because they would not modify ie to include w3c standards that did the same thing. so now many people and companies were forced to use ie because some site they needed to use required one of those plugins.

this continued on until so many major security flaws were found in ie that it drove people who didnt even know what a web browser was to firefox.

[tacos]

This too is a narrow view. Another way to look at it is that people were building apps in the browser and they needed to do real stuff. Browser apps needed to talk to devices, legacy systems, card readers, EEPROM programmers, medical imagers... whatever the hell it is that people jam into Windows. And those devices weren't magically going to sprout a REST interface. There had to be a transitional period.

Microsoft had been making developers happy for a decade by giving that exact sort of functionality in local file Explorer, in Word, in Excel, on the desktop, via COM/OLE/VBScript and god knows what else. So they tried it.

The blood/brain barrier between OS and Browser remains up for debate a decade later.

The W3C remains woefully understaffed and even today hasn't solved basic problems that were solved in the dumb terminal era of the 1970s.

There's a lot of shit that got shoved into the browser when we were excited about browsers that shouldn't be there. Likewise there's a LOT of OS-level functionality missing from the browser that may or may not belong there, but which I don't see appearing in the next 10 years either.

[wvenable]

> microsoft began creating plugins for utilities that did not follow web standards such as activex that would integrate the browser with the operating system.

It should be noted that the technology behind ActiveX actually started as a Netscape plugin developed by a 3rd party. I remember trying it out way before ActiveX became a thing in IE. It was a crazy idea but back then everything was a crazy idea. There were hundreds of different plugins for all the browsers. Nobody knew what was going to stick. ActiveX stuck because it was Microsoft and because COM was a well established technology.