Yet, we actually owe many modern web features to Microsoft with IE. There is the obvious stuff, like xmlHttpRequest (Ajax) but also simple stuff like allowing event handlers on every DOM element.

All the stuff that Firefox/Chrome/Safari/Opera are doing now is exactly what IE did for it's entire history up to version 6. And really, IE very quickly became the superior browser of the day. But from then on, they appear to only be putting in minimal effort with no innovation.