But it was technically unremovable, in those days you could open a windows explorer and type an URL and then you suddenly have internet explorer right into your window. It was an awful design flaw that costed them lagging apart after the post IE6 era.
The other thing is that wouldn't matter if Netscape were superior. Actually, it didn't matter because that was still the case and once better browsers came up (Firefox, Chrome), Internet Explorer turned in technical debt.
So still now the whole "the browser comes as default" sounds like a whining excuse to me.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/business/longterm/micro...
Had they succeeded with the IE strategy, ActiveX controls would have the same endemic status as Flash does now, but unimplementable on any browser other than IE.
The situation was still there when Firefox and Chrome came to play (and I suspect also the intent) and it didn't prevent IE to step aside.
The same goes to Flash... it is still there because there still are stuff you can't do in HTML 5 (streaming live video for instance) and without a real alternative we would have to live with it (hopefully that will change soon)
This is still the case, isn't it? You can type "//google.com" into Explorer's address bar and it will launch your default browser to that address.
They promote it as a security feature, but it only protects their own interests. It does very little to protect actual user data (which is what the user cares about), and all to protect their eco-system (and therefore, their finances).
The Microsoft consent decree was about restricting browser choice by shipping their own browser as default and claiming it was unremovable. By contrast, today Apple idevices not only ship with a browser but ban all competing browsers (via the ban on run-time compilation effectively banning JIT compilers). Apple have total control over every application that is allowed to ship on the platform and take a 30% cut.
Google are responsible for Android, which is Free software to the absolute minimum they could get away with by law. It relies on millions of lines of GPL'd code, yet for most phones it's quite hard to get a rebuildable source tree that even includes all the kernel drivers, and if you do it may be prohibited from loading by a locked bootloader.