Curious to hear about these good intentions from MS/IE after the browser wars. Honestly, not being sarcastic. From what I've heard they stopped innovating because they no longer had competition, until Firefox in the early 2000's.
Auth design, process isolation, and why you should be using SSL and certs: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2000...
XML and XPath: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2000...
Introduction of .NET: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2000...
Also, they had visual J++. That was a nice ide, with an embrace and extend strategy to be evil.
The.NET history seems incomplete. I recall downloading .NET beta for FreeBSD in the 90s or maybe beginning of 2000.
I can’t seem to find anything about this anymore
But IE set a whole lot of standards and pushed the web forward.
The one complaint with IE was that at some point it stagnated. This was unlikely due to malice on MS’s part and more likely because once again, MS’s shitty coding standards meant it just couldn’t improve. One way to know this is true is the fact that even after IE was surpassed and rapidly losing market share, MS wasn’t able to bring it up to speed with its competitors.
It had to create an entirely new browser to even try and come close.