As someone who worked on software from the 80s to today, I don't know about MS internally, but from the outside it definitely didn't feel like good intentions. It didn't help that interviews or articles with or about Gates or Ballmer were about destroying competitors. They have a trackrecord in those years of doing that at all cost and I believe IE was part of that strategy. I have never seen anything to the contrary, but happy to hear insider info to the contrary.
A bit of time after they won, IE development basically stalled, which I see some people attribute to other things, but, again, where is the documentation this was not malice? Simply: we won, the rest is dead, why spend money on dev for something that doesn't make money? Isn't that the most obvious?
ActiveX (while there was Java, oh boy J++) was another sign that there was no intention of making this open tech but just peddle more windows (granted, there was IE for Mac and Solaris, for a while).
Again, I might be wrong, I had issues with MS in those days because of their behaviour which probably colors my memory, but reading back now, I was not alone in this. Maybe someone can point me in another direction with more documentation and proof instead of memories.