That's definitely an interesting point. Had Microsoft continued to add features to IE during that time they likely would have created a bunch of new "standards" purely because of their market share.

There would not have been an incubation period where new ideas and standards could be worked out. Had Microsoft just pushed forward I suspect we would have a lot of "web standards" that wouldn't have much purpose beyond furthering Microsoft's monopoly. I'm not suggesting that Microsoft took this time off purposely to incubate new ideas, but it could be looked at as a beneficial side effect.

In a bizarre way, MS is continuing to create standards: when you're a developer, you have to have all the IE bug fixes in your back pocket and know which bugs are IE's bugs and which ones are yours. How much time do you think is spent circumventing IE's shortcomings? It's strange to think that there's a whole slew of sites that get tons of traffic based on IE's flaws.

Well, during the IE6 stagnation W3C was working on the incompatible XHTML2. WHATWG was created the year Firefox was released.

That's a valid argument, however I'm sure you could argue that there would have been other benefits had they continued to innovate and release which may or may not have had a more positive net impact. Who knows? It doesn't lessen the pain any.

Regardless, I'm definitely not going to thank MS for this since I'm pretty sure your argument was not their intended effect (What was their intended affect anyways? Did they just not care? Concern over the threat the web posed to their OS?) and I will continue to promote IE's competitors until someday IE dies a horrible death and sinks into oblivion.

I'm also guessing you're of a similar view (albeit not as hardcore) and playing devil's advocate anyways ;)

> Some ... luminaries ... argue

Mind pointing me to some specific examples of these arguments?

IE6 the best browser available.

Now there's a frightening thought.

This is 2001, pre-firefox. If you want a frightening thought then try it's main competitor: Netscape Navigator 4!

I remember Opera was my browser of choice around that time, it was a seriously nippy browser back then, way ahead of it's time. Unfortunately the fact that there was no free version prevented them from getting a decent share of the browser market. Later on, they did eventually release a free version but with an ad banner in the navigation bar (of course Opera is now completely free and doesn't have any ad banner).

Netscape complicator, I mean communicator. The browser that was almost impossible to download by itself instead of the entire suite of useless crap.

I'm convinced the source code that became so unmanageable for the Netscape team started with frames.

We're talking 2001 here, when Firefox was still mozilla/browser (and had no own name), an experimental branch of Mozilla, back when Venkman was the one and only debugger for Mozilla. KDE 2.0 (first release including KHTML), Opera 6 (new feature: unicode support), OSX 10.0 (and 10.1) bundling IE5/Mac.

The alternative to MSIE was Netscape Communicator 4 (which had been stagnating since 1998), Mozilla 1.0 itself was still more than a year away.

I remember using Konqueror at the time. Plugins were in external processes and they introduced tabs and other insane ideas way ahead of the time.