Apparently you are right, they do since around February on iOS 17.4. In the EU only.

https://developer.apple.com/support/alternative-browser-engi...

MS went through anti-trust investigation for more than just bundling IE, and at the time commanded a much larger market share¹ of desktop computing than Apple do of the mobile market now.

But while your comparison is flawed, I agree with the assertion² that Apple should not be locking user choice like this. The EU agree too, hence Apple's immature little hissy fit nearly breaking their (already "not quite there") offline-first app support for EU users when they were told so.

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[1] Avoiding the word "monopoly" to pre-counter the sort of "well actually" responses I got about dictionary definitions last time I said something like this.

[2] Unless I'm reading you backwards and you are saying MS should have been able to like Apple currently do!

They didn't totally get away with, the EU has set them to rights at least. It's just a shame they didn't use it as an opportunity to do the right thing globally at that point rather than sharding the market.

The Microsoft ruling in the US was that Microsoft was forcing third-party OEMs (Dell, HP etc) to ship Internet Explorer, not that they shipped it themselves.

As for the EU, they have already forced Apple to allow third-party browser engines under the DMA, as well as are forcing Apple to show a "browser ballot" like they made Microsoft do.

> Make it make sense.

Microsoft’s anti-trust lawsuit with the DOJ was 23 years ago. There are people working at Microsoft and Apple who weren’t even alive when that happened.

Times change.

The market shifted, and two decades passed. Most importantly the courts have been packed with jurists from the Federalist society, who are libertarian. As a result there are far more judges willing and able to throw out consumer protection cases such as what happened in the 90’s with Microsoft and IE.