Comment by jeroenhd

IE was not just used to break the internet. It also had advantages. It supported features other browsers didn't.

Without IE, we wouldn't have had XMLHttpRequest, which means we wouldn't have had Gmail, which means we wouldn't have seen the bloom of "web 2.0" websites.

As for Java, Microsoft's C# is way ahead of Java in terms of language features. No idea how the runtime performance compares these days (both are very fast), but I'd rather have Microsoft Java than Oracle Java.

Microsoft's intent was always to break the competition, but they did it by offering features others wouldn't or couldn't. Evil Microsoft's Windows was the most feature-packed operating system out there because they threw every possible feature at the wall, kept what sticked front and center, and bothered to maintain what didn't stick. Microsoft Agents, the shitty Clippy things, were supported well into the Windows 7 era despite dying out the moment Bonzi Buddy was found out to be malicious. But Microsoft dared to break backwards compatibility with .NET 1 to fix the typing problem with generics that Java has to this very day; they just ended up supporting both, side by side.