"They built proprietary extensions to the web, which the rest of the world - and particularly the open source world - had to reverse engineer and spend ridiculo

"They built proprietary extensions to the web, which the rest of the world - and particularly the open source world - had to reverse engineer and spend ridiculous amounts of effort to implement." One example is XHR, which is probably the single defining feature of the modern web. Good standards simply codify whatever "proprietary" features we've found are useful.