You are living in denial when you claim that the web would have never taken off were it not for Microsoft, especially when it was/is probably the biggest threat to the open web we now know. Every possible alternative OS would have been at least as capable of propelling the web, probably more so as katbyte points out.
Your argument is about the same as telling North Korean citizens they have to thank the Dear Leader for the good things they have. Technically correct but horribly lacking in perspective.
Yes Netscape was having problems around that time, good luck trying to finance the development of a complex commercial software project when your competitor is abusing its monopoly by bundling a free alternative with its operating system. You are right about the ancient history timeframe but my points are valid for everything that happened with and after version 6, you know… the point when the web and broadband really started to take off.
And you could have used Opera or the Phoenix/Firebird Firefox-precursor instead of IE6.
Right, because Microsoft invented it all (OS-tech) and nobody else would have been able to produce a graphical OS in it’s place… there is a difference between actually innovating and making a difference and simply being there because you were able to dominate the market trough shady practices. As I pointed out these things rather happened despite Microsoft than because of it.
If anything the amount of bias is way to low, MS singlehandedly crippled progress on the web for many many years and would deserve to be burned to the ground by an angry mob of webdevs for it.
You can develop in Chrome and it just works in Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc., but without fail things are always broken in IE (yes also in 6+ versions). Any webdev could tell you about the horrors.
IE versions have always been DOA compared to what’s possible in competing browsers at the time. Microsoft's fault of not getting people to upgrade is their own doing by not anticipating and adequately reacting to the problem… or frankly just not giving a shit™. Others don’t have these upgrade problems.
Also, we can be very thankful that they failed in their ploy to make the whole web IE-specific, but we should not forget and it’s to soon to forgive.
I don’t even...