Microsoft has a long history of extend, embrace and extinguish, IE was just one of those.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/intel-exec-ms-wanted-to-extend...
> It was in this meeting that Microsoft executives said they intended to "embrace, extend, extinguish" competing technologies, including Internet standard HTML, McGeady said
https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/atr/legacy/2006/...
> we will loose [sic] the Internet platform battle if we do not have a significant user installed base. The industry would simply ignore our standards. Few would write Windows apps without the Windows user base. — at your level, if you let your customers deploy Netscape Navigator, you loose [sic] the leadership on the desktop.
