Maybe IE was better for a while. But for a long time it wasn't, and it wasn't allowed to stand by itself. That was the problem. It was the de facto standard, not by being good, but by being pushed via Windows.
I hope we can agree a text editor is different that a browser, word processor, or an IDE (at least nowadays). Nobody complains that Microsoft ships Nodepad or Paint, because they are the bare minimum and avoidable. Hell, they shipped Nodepad and Wordpad, and neither dented Word's market share.
Regarding 2, this is unbelievably naive. For such an important product, of course Microsoft would find a way to make it do "essential" OS tasks. Apple/iOS is obviously much worse in this regard. But for better or worse, iOS devices are a minority in the EU.
> "Regarding 2, this is unbelievably naive. For such an important product, of course Microsoft would find a way to make it do "essential" OS tasks."
The Start Menu in Windows 10/11 is HTML/CSS. It's not a matter of "finding ways" to make it do things, HTML was pushed as being the document description / display technology, why wouldn't Microsoft use it for Explorer folder views and Active Desktop? Why shouldn't they be allowed to? You could embed web pages in the Win98 desktop background, that's the kind of embedded document thing people were researching and crowing about in the 60s and 70s in alternative OS's. It's the kind of thing users wanted with rainmeter and SysInternals' bginfo. IIRC you could edit the CSS and change the theme of Explorer folder views, give them new colours and background images.
> "Nobody complains that Microsoft ships Nodepad or Paint, because they are the bare minimum and avoidable."
Nobody complains that Microsoft shipped the best CSharp compiler csc.exe (before .Net span off into its own thing), and didn't ship or encourage Mono or Xamarin compilers. Or PowerShell and not Perl. Why don't those things attract the interests of the courts? And now they can ship Edge, and that's apparently fine now?
What's unbelievable is Microsoft being charged with a crime for giving away free stuff that was significantly better than any other implementation out there.
As if giving consumers free tools was harming them. As if Microsoft ever prevented any other browser from being installed.
Never mind that today nearly every OS comes with a free browser. Even my Kindle comes with one.
I hope we can agree a text editor is different that a browser, word processor, or an IDE (at least nowadays). Nobody complains that Microsoft ships Nodepad or Paint, because they are the bare minimum and avoidable. Hell, they shipped Nodepad and Wordpad, and neither dented Word's market share.
Regarding 2, this is unbelievably naive. For such an important product, of course Microsoft would find a way to make it do "essential" OS tasks. Apple/iOS is obviously much worse in this regard. But for better or worse, iOS devices are a minority in the EU.