First of all, you did not cite market share numbers to show lack of an effective monopoly. You cited a fun wall chart of all the various browsers, most with tiny and non-growing if not rapidly shrinking market share back in 1995. Come on!
Edit: some stats from wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_market_share#GVU_WWW_us...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_market_share#Dataquest_...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Netscape-navigator-usage-d...
Anyone around in the Netscape era knows that Netscape took over most of the market from Mosaic and smaller-share browsers, and evolved the web rapidly with proprietary (in the same sense I use against Google, however standardized later) extensions.
This led to Bill Gates' famous memo about the Internet Tidal Wave, and his cancellation of Microsoft's 1994-era AOL-killer, Project Blackbird.
Netscape dominated browser market share until IE came up to version 4, which was better on Windows than Netscape's old version 3 or very late version 4, and IE was bundled and locked-in hard to boot.
"It's hypocritical to blast Google ...."
Accusing me of hypocrisy shows ignorance of that word's definition in light of the history of my career.
I'm not practicing one thing and preaching another. I worked on JS standardization less than a year after shipping it in Netscape 2 beta. After that I co-founded mozilla.org. I'm not currently doing A and preaching not-A, nor have I been doing "proprietary" work for a long time. I've paid my dues.
Just FYI, like I owe you any explanations, Netscape did collaborate with Sun, gaining the "JavaScript" trademark license (a marketing scam, of course; I hated it). And I did collaborate with Bill Joy of Sun. But really, that's irrelevant.
Netscape was a monopoly in effect (it's very rare for a real-world monopoly to have 100% of the market). We did not have ability or time to make open standards of all our work. We knew, because Netscape had rejected a low-ball acquisition offer from Microsoft in late 1994, that Microsoft was coming after us. And we knew they had the power to kill us.
If we had not pushed hard to add programmability to the web (JS and Java in Netscape 2, plugins before in 1.1), then Microsoft would have been the reigning monopoly power, and would have abused that power (which did happen; it was prosecuted successfully).
So, though it's no justification in general, Netscape -- including my JS work -- did forestall a likely Microsoft push of their tech -- including VB as the Web scripting language. Monopoly good-cop/bad-cop act, or just history now, neither all "good" nor all "bad".
This is in contrast to today, where there is no browser monopoly and the top three have very close shares in many locales -- especially if you sort by model as well as make, and include WebKit variations on mobile, which is rising to eclipse desktop.
"Dart is going to be an open platform that is well-supported by Chrome and Android."
I think your sock-puppet is slipping. How do you know this? Do you work for Google?
Nice HN history you have, btw (two comments, both on this thread today). Why not do as on Google+ and use your real name? I have.