I think, perhaps, we are talking about different eras. When IE came on the scene in the mid 90s it was garbage. Anyone tech-savvy was using Netscape and laughing at the pitiful entrance from Microsoft. Netscape was vastly superior and had a huge runway (so it seemed). But the thing is, MS bundled the browser with the OS and called it the “internet”. Click here for the “internet”. How do you compete with a free app installed on the desktop of every computer? Netscape had an existential crisis on their hands and legal wrangling over anti-competitive behaviour was never going to be fast enough to save them.

Behind the scenes things were already chaos and the code was an irredeemable pile of technical debt (or so the story goes, I’ve never looked at the code). New Netscape versions came out, but the rapid improvements of the early years were gone. It was a buggy unstable mess that seemed to get worse with every release while IE got better (not great, but the trajectory was clear). Soon even nerds like me were using IE because Netscape had jumped all of the sharks. By the time we were partying like it was 1999, IE was the only game in town. And then MS called the internet “done” and went back to throwing chairs and yelling “developers” a bunch.

I’ve never been a web dev, but I expect that the pain of those lost years where MS cared little for standards due to lack of any meaningful competition, could have been dramatically shortened. I’ve always hated www, ever since it devoured my beloved gopher and brought on the eternal September, but it’s a real testament to the power of standards that this inefficient, ugly, slow but ubiquitous method for deploying content has been so successful. Once Microsoft and Adobe finally got out of the way.