I won't entirely blame the legal interference for Microsoft's software design in IE. It would have been possible to keep the core HTML components without shipp

I won't entirely blame the legal interference for Microsoft's software design in IE. It would have been possible to keep the core HTML components without shipping a functional browser frontend. It would have also been possible to make these core HTML components versionable, so that a given Windows version could offer multiple versions of IE at the same time. The fact that they failed to do both of those things wasn't the fault of the courts. Some of their design decisions were explicitly made to make the browser itself appear more integral than it really was.