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Comment by batty_alex

Yeah, except the bundling wasn't the problem. It was that Microsoft was using their size to build a giant moat around IE. If you wanted modern features, it was all on IE and behind their proprietary scripting languages (vbscript, jscript, mshtml, activex controls)

This was all part of the anti-competitive embrace, extend, extinguish strategy that was so common at Microsoft then. They would offer a tool that was "close" to a popular standard (javascript, html), then extend it with their own tooling (jscript, mshtml), and finally they would replace those with a proprietary toolchain (vbscript, activex controls)

That meant the entire market moved to IE and it ate up almost all the market share overnight, even though it was a dumpster fire of a browser compared to the competition

parent batty_alex 2 years ago

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