Microsoft won the browser war and stopped making browsers
IE6 shipped in August 2001 and got no successor for over five years
The market's verdict: -9.6% on MSFT in the week after.
What actually happened
Internet Explorer 6 arrived on August 27, 2001, three months before Microsoft settled the antitrust case, and then the browser stood still. No tabs, standards support frozen in 2001, and a drip feed of security patches for a product nobody was improving on purpose. The consent decree approved in November 2002 imposed conduct remedies but left Internet Explorer welded to Windows, and the web spent years bending itself into IE6 shapes to cope. Web developers coded around those quirks until roughly the end of the decade. The settlement let Microsoft keep the bundle. Everyone else got to keep the browser.
This one is officially acknowledged.
They did it more than once
First they bundled it, then they forced it. Same instinct, twenty years apart.
Links
↳ caused by Internet Explorer 6
Timeline
- Aug 27, 2001 Stood by it Microsoft stood by it.