Microsoft did that on their own, and are now finding it hard to just pull even with everyone else.
Nice revisionist history though, the DOJ is a nice scapegoat to cover for the fact that they did nothing with IE until recently.
Why did the DOJ decision not affect recent innovation, then?
Right. Specious argument. Gotcha.
Please don't mindlessly repeat Microsoft's line about having to wait for standards to be signed, sealed, and delivered. It's just spin. They have a broken development model (and a financial interest in holding back the web) and that is no-one's fault but their own.
Redmond has been sleeping, no doubt. But that is neither here nor there. It's refreshing to see other browser teams giving the IE team a run for their money and whipping them into shape -- they've been needing that for almost 10 years, finally getting them off their laurels. Competition is the best part of the space, and that should include innovative APIs (not yet standard) that us engineers can exploit to make our applications better, faster, or stronger. I'm certainly not going to wait for some standards committee to deliberate for 8 years over some monolithic spec that every browser will get wrong anyhow, as history has shown.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest#History_and_supp...
You'll note the browsers implemented it before standardisation, as is traditional and sensible despite Microsoft's fervent myth-making to the contrary.
(I note that you now seem to be claiming that IE was simply resting on its laurels in a turtle vs hare fashion, rather than being forced into retirement by over-regulation)
Besides, the question was whether IE has held innovation. They have not. They were asked to stop for deliberations; they did; we are still waiting. It's hardly Microsoft's fault IE6 was so innovative that "NOW" browsers have yet to move against IE like IE moved against its competitors during the years of IE4 and IE6 (IE5 Mac).
The point being, waiting for "standards" to be signed, sealed, and delivered is all that has been holding back innovation. Once out of that rut, we can start pushing cool technology. ECMA CLI in browsers? Now that is innovation, snuffed.