Browser Wars History

It's safe to guess that if Netscape had won in the 90s, JS and the browser would have progressed much farther in the 2000s. Microsoft was in it to stop the browser being used as a platform that threatened their monopoly. Once everyone was using IE, they had little incentive need to improve it.

It’s very simple: at the time, MS controlled the market for consumer and office computing. There was no such thing as Bing and Google was just getting started. Apple was not doing well, and mobile phones as we know them didn’t exist yet. They understood browsers to be a platform that could replace desktop software, potentially making Windows irrelevant, and they wanted to hold back and/or control the web platform.

That's only because it was the "Chrome" (i.e. the dominant browser). Look at what happened when Microsoft eventually tried to catch up with Chrome - they gave up.

The browser absolutely did this -- just compare the importance and dominance of MS Windows in the late 90's / early 00's to today.

Google could let Chrome rot: Microsoft let Internet Explorer rot back in the days before Edge (primarily because Microsoft recognised that browsers would compete with their Windows monopoly: which is exactly what happened).

This is not exactly right. Netscape Navigator was the original browser. Microsoft invested a lot of money to bring IE up to par and exceed Netscape’s capabilities. And once they wiped out Netscape they coasted and used IE as a Trojan horse to control the web. It was after IE6’s stagnation that Firefox was spun out of Netscape and took some time to compete. Firefox was first released in 2004 and IE6 in 2001. Opera which had been around was proprietary. To the extent they were interested in making

Well, part of it was that there weren't other browsers to worry about. At the time there was no Chrome, no Safari (no one used Macs in a corporate environment if there was), and no Firefox. All that you had was IE and Netscape, and Netscape was on kind of shaky ground at that point.Those two kind of fought with each other by introducing new features that made web pages incompatible with the others. Also, even then corporations weren't really keen on letting you use some other browser, so IE w

You're presenting that as an exclusive choice when the correct answer is both. Microsoft absolutely was trying to subvert the web — they correctly perceived Netscape as a huge threat to Windows’ platform dominance — and they made numerous decisions to accomplish that, and then had roughly a decade where they were able to single-handedly stymie progress. Had the iPhone not been a hit, it probably would have worked, too — I supported web standards and Mozilla through that period but it really

That's how Microsoft won the browser wars few years ago.

Don't underestimate Microsoft Won’t Fix which helped IE dominate the browser market for over a decade.