From what I've heard, MS's whole idea was that ultimately, "the web" was broadly going to be scrapped. What people were actually going to be using, "in a few y

From what I've heard, MS's whole idea was that ultimately, "the web" was broadly going to be scrapped. What people were actually going to be using, "in a few years", was going to still be IE, but the webpage would just be a thin wrapper that would load in ActiveX controls delivering actual windows apps, in the browser. Apparently they got close enough to getting this working that a bunch of South Korean banks and such bought into it heavily, which meant you could only do online banking in that country, for a while, on either a windows phone or an actual windows machine. However, they narrowly missed getting developer buy-in on that stateside, before the whole "XMLHttpRequest" thing went crazy, and we started building javascript apps for everything.