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this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
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Because that was part of MS's EEE strategy.
Ooo boy you do not remember your history.
When Microsoft started pushing IE, they did everything in their power to sabotage the competition. That included the creation of a proprietary web extension called ActiveX. Back in the day, this, along with non-standard behaviour when dealing with the actual standards, was the reason why many, many sites would not work in non-IE browsers. Developers only cared about what worked in IE, not what was standard. That didn't change until the arrival of Firefox.
You know how trademarks work? Sue or lose it.
I remember my history quite well, all the way back to Mosaic and before. I also remember "Best viewed with Netscape" websites (1994), when everyone and his uncle had a proprietary plugin they were trying to push, and only a handful of developers (I was one of them) actually cared about any standards. Firefox (2004) came very late to the party, way after the "MSIE can't be uninstalled from Windows" shenanigans (1997).
Wouldn't have applied in this case. Microsoft actually did have permission from Sun to use the trademark...right up until they made their Java VM incompatible with base Java, and Sun sued to terminate the agreement.
Okay? And? None of them had any actual leverage to force people into using their standards. Microsoft had a de facto monopoly on an essential bit of computing software that they leveraged to hell and back to make their proprietary standards THE de facto standard.
And at that point, IE had a 97% market share. Care to take a wild stab in the dark why?
And... they still failed miserably. All their anticompetitive agreements to force PC sellers to preinstall Windows with MSIE as the default browser, all their agreements with Apple to make MSIE the default browser on OSX, didn't change the fact that ActiveX was as popular as Java outside of intranets, and everyone turned to Flash to overcome the incompatibilities between browsers.
MSIE was a scourge for web developers, because every web had to be checked with the majority player who wasn't standards compliant, yet it still didn't manage to take over HTML, not even with a 97% market share, not ever.
My main browsers have been MOSAIC, Netscape, then Firefox, during all that time. I can say with a straight face that I only ever used MSIE, Opera, or Safari, to make sure a web was still working in them, while 99% of the WWW was still working fine with a standards compliant browser (plus Flash).
Nowadays all browsers are standards compliant... with the living standard that is Chromium, which not even Google itself can EEE (see how Firefox is adding Manifest V3 without deprecating the adbloker API that Google wanted to extinguish).
That worked pretty well to stop Microsoft's attempt at EEE-ing it, didn't it? However, keep in mind that Java was not FOSS back then (1996-2001), it only got open sourced in 2006. The first stab at EEE-ing a FOSS Java, was Oracle's, and that didn't go well. Now Microsoft is releasing builds of OpenJDK, which they won't EEE either.