Firstly they would be pilloried for having a "proprietary" browser and being "anti-standards". More importantly, IE can't run on your Firefox OS phone or your

Firstly they would be pilloried for having a "proprietary" browser and being "anti-standards". More importantly, IE can't run on your Firefox OS phone or your ChromeOS chromebook or your iOS tablet. 'Deflecting' to IE would mean buying entirely new hardware (and in the case of phones, probably a new multi-year contract). That isn't an accident. The best way to ensure your browser remains relevant (i.e. you retain veto power over any new standards) is to create OSs that can only run a single browser. You then have millions of users that are locked into your browser to use as bargaining chips. A world where all user-facing software has to target a single standard gives vast power to the owners of that standard. Very few people seem to be considering this problem. No matter how benevolent you think Google or Mozilla are today, it is madness to place so much trust in them. Their interests do not align with yours, and there are very few checks or balances to the system: end users or independent developers have basically zero say in the web standards process.