The intent was to "cut off Netscape's air supply":
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.
I am not saying that wasn't the intent. What I am saying is the only real guilty one in the Netscape fail was Netscape.
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)
Re:Microsoft’s Very Good Day
by chadzawistowski on Thursday October 08, 2015 @04:08PM
(#10355767)
> in those days you could open a windows explorer and type an URL and then you suddenly have internet explorer right into your window
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.
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.