Overall some very interesting points, but as I remember it, MS stopped innovating in IE when the competition died off. Netscape was in the gutter and went OSS,

Overall some very interesting points, but as I remember it, MS stopped innovating in IE when the competition died off. Netscape was in the gutter and went OSS, which ended up meaning a massive gap in releases while they rewrote the thing, and Opera was still for-pay. The DOJ intervention was too late to have any impact. Hence, IE6 remained stagnant until MS started feeling some heat from Firefox.