Microsoft entered the market with IE.
To be specific, after failing to license Netscape Navigator, Microsoft built IE out of the existing Spyglass Mosaic project, which licensed non-code stuff from NSCA Mosaic, on which Netscape was originally based (well, both were Andreessen's projects). It's interesting how connected it all was at the start, and how quickly they tend to diverge and converge over time.

And don't forget that Internet Explorer (on Windows) supports any scripting language that the system's Windows Scripting Host supports, including Perl and Python (via ActiveState). That's where JScript and VBScript support comes from in the first place.

Of course, this pluggable language sytem wasn't very useful on the web when it was burdened with the flaws of IE6, despite its once near-ubiquity. Thankfully, web developers and browser developers alike are much better at making Javascript and the DOM work reasonably nowadays, so changing languages wouldn't provide enough benefit to justify it.

In reply to Re^4: There is probably just one way to do it by Anonymous Monk
in thread There is probably just one way to do it by punkish

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.