ActiveX was never 'dominant' really. It was always a duopoly with Java (and in many use cases also with flash!) and a pretty niche one at that (corporate software and crappy webcams)
Right. If the government hadn't stepped in to encourage Microsoft to play nice, we might live in a world where "the web" simply means Internet Explorer.
I'm beyond the point of negotiating with the people on this website. Apple is due in for exactly the same treatment, it's only a matter of time before the US eats their favorite crow.
> If the government hadn't stepped in to encourage Microsoft to play nice, we might live in a world where "the web" simply means Internet Explorer.
I kinda doubt that. As soon as Microsoft had a virtual monopoly on the browser market, they let IE go stale for years. Hardly any feature development, hardly any bug squashing. Terrible security. By the time the browser choice thing in the EU and the antitrust thing in the US happened, the rot had already set in and everyone was fed up and yearning for a browser that didn't suck. Google drove their Chrome truck right into that gap.
If IE had actually been a decent browser, no amount of "choose your browser" screens would have been enough to sway people from it. Just like they cling to Chrome now because Google is too smart to make that mistake.
PS FWIW I don't like and hardly use chrome but technically as a browser it's great, I just don't like Google's attitude to privacy.
Look, as someone who was rooting for MS to lose big time back then, I would have been happy for that to be true. But MS lost through hubris, not the antitrust settlement.
