Well, back in the late 90s it was all about ActiveX and integration with other Windows components and applications in order to shove all other browsers out of the marketplace, gain dominance over the web, and further bolster the Windows hegemony by doing so.
So, as one trivial example, you could export a Word document as a web page, open it up in IE and it would look great. But then you'd open it up in Netscape and you're left wondering "WTF?" because it looked terrible and the images were horribly degraded - intentionally degraded, as it turned out.
You'd open up the page source to figure out what was going on and you'd see a bunch of ActiveX crap for the images that would only work in IE. And, IIRC, the images themselves were BMPs, rather than JPEG or GIF (can't remember if PNG was supported at this point in any browser, but it certainly wasn't by IE or Office apps). So the images would look high quality in IE (and have massive file sizes, because BMP), whereas Netscape and other browsers didn't support ActiveX or BMP so they were just displayed as low-quality (IIRC) GIFs with extremely low colour depth. They could have displayed high quality images if they'd used a more suitable format, like JPEG, but they deliberately chose the most crappy image format, so that photos would look terrible in anything other than IE and people would think IE was a better browser as a result.
Once the EU's antitrust case against Microsoft gained pace, IE development really stalled, and that's when it stopped evolving. This was around the time of late IE4/early IE5 era. You'd be hard pressed to spot any substantive differences between IE5 (released in, what, 1999?) and IE6 (release, I think, in 2001). So then, fast forward to the 2010s and IE6 is still around all over the place: doesn't support PNG, doesn't support HTML5, doesn't support much of CSS, polyfills can only cover up so much, etc.
You had IE7, IE8, and IE9 as well, which were also dogshit (IE9 marginally less so), and didn't implement standards properly or had some MS-centric view of functionality implemented (old habits die hard, even though the battle was lost by that stage).
IE10 was starting to feel like Microsoft were taking web standards seriously, but still didn't support loads of recent APIs (Web Audio springs immediately to mind). Same with IE11: better but still too far off.
Edge was better again but caught in the middle: it still wasn't as good as Chrome and Firefox but now it had also removed all vestiges of IE support, for addins and suchlike, so it had alienated that crowd too.
And then Microsoft just sort of gave up: they moved Edge to Chromium which, at the time, I thought was a mistake and bad for the browser landscape and, no surprise, so it has turned out to be.
Now you have all the Chromium based browsers (including Brave), and Firefox (which is substantially funded via Google), and there aren't really any other mainstream capable browser engines out there. And, no surprise, Google are abusing their effective monopoly power because that's what effective monopolies always do.
Chrome actually is the new IE because with it Google are doing (much more successfully) what Microsoft tried to do with IE in the late 90s.
And then Microsoft just sort of gave up: they moved Edge to Chromium which, at the time, I thought was a mistake and bad for the browser landscape and, no surprise, so it has turned out to be.
I personally loath Microsoft, and came up through the Commodore tract, into Linux. Never could stand the company, their products.
I won't blindly dislike, I had my reasons, but it's been a long time since the early years. So I tried Edge for android, back when Microsoft was going on about not being an ads platform like Google.
I thought, OK, maybe they've ripped out Google's tracking. Made it less invasive, maybe they'll even enable pinch zoom and reflow, like Opera does.
Nope. None of that. And the amount of phone home I saw with tcpdump was mind bogglng.
So sad. They could have taken chrome, made it non-invasive, added pinch zoom and reflow, and lots of other such things. I'd have used it, been happy with it, sing their praises.
But instead, it's the same old, short range, junk.
In the 90s many things were only possible with ActiveX or Java Applets. ActiveX just had the nice side effect of only running on Windows and IE. But, it's important to remember browsers were much much less capable than they are today. I was writing 'webapps' and manipulating the dom and javascript was sloooow (on both IE or FF). One hack I did was have the server dynamically writing js code (instead of doing something on the client) and doing htmx like we see making a comeback today.
This is very true: if you wanted to do anything interactive you really had to dive into Java, Flash, or ActiveX. But, as you say, ActiveX was Windows and IE only, and that wasn't an accident.
And it wasn't just that JavaScript and DOM manipulation were slow: it was incredibly lacking in capabilities. Any kind of basic drawing? Nope. Multimedia support? Nope. Local storage? Nope. Decent networking capability and access to remote APIs? Nope. Good, standardised browser APIs? Nope, and hence the arrival of JQuery, Dojo, et al.
I completely agree with you but Microsoft's approach was deliberately and calculatedly shady.
>ActiveX just had the nice side effect of only running on Windows and IE.
It also had the nice side effect of being the security equivalent of a sucking chest wound. Flash and Java Applets were bad too (c.f. the famous Java classloader vulnerability, which could be exploited by loading a malicious applet), but they didn't seem to be nearly as bad as the horror that was ActiveX. Perhaps it was because ActiveX was intentionally designed to integrate with the host OS, or because it was more deeply integrated into the browser, but my recollection of ActiveX is that Microsoft never managed to get security right for ActiveX, and the way that ActiveX security was "solved" was by ditching ActiveX entirely.
Well, back in the late 90s it was all about ActiveX and integration with other Windows components and applications in order to shove all other browsers out of the marketplace, gain dominance over the web, and further bolster the Windows hegemony by doing so.
So, as one trivial example, you could export a Word document as a web page, open it up in IE and it would look great. But then you'd open it up in Netscape and you're left wondering "WTF?" because it looked terrible and the images were horribly degraded - intentionally degraded, as it turned out.
You'd open up the page source to figure out what was going on and you'd see a bunch of ActiveX crap for the images that would only work in IE. And, IIRC, the images themselves were BMPs, rather than JPEG or GIF (can't remember if PNG was supported at this point in any browser, but it certainly wasn't by IE or Office apps). So the images would look high quality in IE (and have massive file sizes, because BMP), whereas Netscape and other browsers didn't support ActiveX or BMP so they were just displayed as low-quality (IIRC) GIFs with extremely low colour depth. They could have displayed high quality images if they'd used a more suitable format, like JPEG, but they deliberately chose the most crappy image format, so that photos would look terrible in anything other than IE and people would think IE was a better browser as a result.
Once the EU's antitrust case against Microsoft gained pace, IE development really stalled, and that's when it stopped evolving. This was around the time of late IE4/early IE5 era. You'd be hard pressed to spot any substantive differences between IE5 (released in, what, 1999?) and IE6 (release, I think, in 2001). So then, fast forward to the 2010s and IE6 is still around all over the place: doesn't support PNG, doesn't support HTML5, doesn't support much of CSS, polyfills can only cover up so much, etc.
You had IE7, IE8, and IE9 as well, which were also dogshit (IE9 marginally less so), and didn't implement standards properly or had some MS-centric view of functionality implemented (old habits die hard, even though the battle was lost by that stage).
IE10 was starting to feel like Microsoft were taking web standards seriously, but still didn't support loads of recent APIs (Web Audio springs immediately to mind). Same with IE11: better but still too far off.
Edge was better again but caught in the middle: it still wasn't as good as Chrome and Firefox but now it had also removed all vestiges of IE support, for addins and suchlike, so it had alienated that crowd too.
And then Microsoft just sort of gave up: they moved Edge to Chromium which, at the time, I thought was a mistake and bad for the browser landscape and, no surprise, so it has turned out to be.
Now you have all the Chromium based browsers (including Brave), and Firefox (which is substantially funded via Google), and there aren't really any other mainstream capable browser engines out there. And, no surprise, Google are abusing their effective monopoly power because that's what effective monopolies always do.
Chrome actually is the new IE because with it Google are doing (much more successfully) what Microsoft tried to do with IE in the late 90s.