The justice department at no point stopped Microsoft from bundling IE with Windows. Nobody suggested otherwise; but that actually wasn’t the point. Microsoft m

The justice department at no point stopped Microsoft from bundling IE with Windows. Nobody suggested otherwise; but that actually wasn’t the point. Microsoft made a deal with the government to stop most of its anticompetitive behavior. It was less about the bundling of IE with Windows than giving OEMs the choice to ship other browsers in addition to IE. Besides that, up until 2008-2010, the “free and open web” was littered with proprietary Flash apps. But that was a choice made by the market to adopt Flash instead of having of having all of the Microsoft stuff forced on them. Nobody forced developers to adopt Flash and there were other choices for audio/video, even if they weren’t as popular as Flash. And if you don’t remember, the “modern web” as it exists today with Ajax was actually a Microsoft addition that everyone else added. Well, to be accurate, Microsoft shipped XMLHttpRequest in IE 5.0 in 1999, as a proprietary Active X component for their products; it was never intended to be a web standard. But it was a cool idea so the other browser makers implemented it. The term AJAX was coined by a Google employee in 2005 and was standardized by the W3C in 2006 [1]. It’s no different than Apple developing the canvas [2] element, which became a web standard, except they were more intentional than Microsoft was about XMLHttpRequest which would be renamed as AJAX. Things would have been very different if the FTC and European regulators (who did make Microsoft ship a version of Windows without IE [3] hadn’t gotten involved. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming) [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canvas_element https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canvas_element [3]: No IE onboard Windows 7 in Europe http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8096701.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8096701.stm