4 ms·

Yet we’d absolutely balk at a computer or phone not coming with a browser by default nowadays. I don’t really think that ruling was on the right side of history

• Qwertious 2y ago
  That's because the browser is a de-facto OS, which occurred only due to a sheer lack of actual OS market innovation - Debian had a package manager 20 years ago, Windows didn't until 2019. Browsers succeeded because apps ("websites") abstracted away the download/install process in a user friendly fashion. That ruling's only fault was that it didn't go far enough in hammering Microsoft's anticompetitive "moat" practices.
• batty_alex 2y ago
  Yeah, except the bundling wasn't the problem. It was that Microsoft was using their size to build a giant moat around IE. If you wanted modern features, it was all on IE and behind their proprietary scripting languages (vbscript, jscript, mshtml, activex controls) This was all part of the anti-competitive embrace, extend, extinguish strategy that was so common at Microsoft then. They would offer a tool that was "close" to a popular standard (javascript, html), then extend it with their own tooling (jscript, mshtml), and finally they would replace those with a proprietary toolchain (vbscript, activex controls) That meant the entire market moved to IE and it ate up almost all the market share overnight, even though it was a dumpster fire of a browser compared to the competition