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The web as envisioned early on by Netscape was supposed to have apps much sooner than it did. Once Microsoft swept aside Netscape by killing their business it basically froze development on IE.

They made one mistake: XMLHttpRequest (probably the last big feature added to IE before the freeze) and we got lucky with Firefox.

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Netscape's vision was java applets though, right? The only thing I can remember that was worse in a browser than Flash. Perhaps we owe Microsoft some thanks.

ActiveX.

Don't ever let yourself forget ActiveX.

XMLHTTP was originally an ActiveX technology, though, from the Outlook team; it wasn't originally developed as part of IE. I guess it wasn't until Mozilla and Apple added a native version that it really took off.

Actually KHTML and Safari supported it earlier, MozillaSuite/Firefox initial support was broken and only when it was fixed in Firefox around 2004 it got tradtion among devs.

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I'm not sure Microsoft's lack of development on Internet Explorer in that era was due to an actual desire to kill the web. It simply had no competitors, so there was no motivation to make the product any better.

Microsoft killed Netscape to kill the thick client planned by Netscape to commoditize Windows. I'm pretty sure that Microsoft (just like Apple today) didn't want the web to succeeded as an app delivery method.

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