IE definitely participated in web standards at the time. Certainly in CSS. They were not as good at bending standards groups to their will as Google has been,

IE definitely participated in web standards at the time. Certainly in CSS. They were not as good at bending standards groups to their will as Google has been, for various reasons, which is why standards did not always match their proposed implementations. But trying to paint IE as not engaged in standards is pretty misleading. (Now I don't think they were too engaged in things like XHTML2, but neither was any other browser, because that group was fundamentally not interested in browsers being engaged, as far as I can tell.)