The truth is more shaded than saying they held back the web. What I remember is that IE 5 came out in 1999, and was a significantly better browser than netscape 4, which was my favorite browser at the time. So, netscape had an inferior product. Meanwhile microsoft also decided to bundle IE with windows, for free, on all new PC's. So netscape had a worse product and worse user acquisition. If you're a startup in that position, what is the logical thing to do? Well, netscape decided the most logical thing was to start a multi-year rewrite of their entire product, with the goal of having an identical UI, but a fresh codebase. IMHO, it is fair to say microsoft helped netscape into the grave, but it is also fair to say netscape did much of the walking.
So, from about 2000 until about 2006 IE was the only game in town because there just weren't any viable competitors (well, ok, there was opera, but...). Looking around and noticing they didn't have competition, microsoft figured they didn't need to iterate their product, so they didn't.
Now, this will sound strange to say now, but IE 6 had the best standards support, in 2001. However, it also had a lot of proprietary features which made things easy to do that were hard to do using W3C standards, which as standards tend to be weren't as developer-friendly as they could have been (I still think CSS's layout model is a big mistake). Web developers being web developers they couldn't resist those features to build stuff quicker, and they ended up building a lot of IE-only sites, which created the legacy which we are still battling today. And that made it very hard for upstart browsers like firefox to gain marketshare.
Now, again IMHO, it is fair to say microsoft did nothing to discourage people from using those proprietary features and getting locked into a dead-end platform. However, it is also fair to say you could and can build a standards-compliant codebase which is IE 6 compatible so developers were helping the jailer put on the chains.
I think blaming it all on MS is easy but inaccurate. It was a shared blame across netscape, microsoft and the web development community of the early 2000's, which ended up in a stagnated browser market from 2000 to 2005/2006.
No, it's pretty accurate. When you gain a monopoly and people stop testing on other browsers, you create a big problem. I never stopped using Netscape/Mozilla. It doesn't matter if IE was better for a period of time. Once it became dominant and incompatible, all other browsers fought a huge uphill battle. IE is still the most widely used desktop browser.
The irony is that many sites now have poor compatibility with IE due to using proprietary webkit-only CSS styles. On mobile it's even worse, with most "mobile optimized" sites being broken even on firefox and opera. Even big sites perform poorly. Engadget's mobile version is broken on anything that's not webkit. It is frustrating to see that people never learn. They're quite happy to change jailers, but quite unwilling to free themselves.
Up until IE5 I remember being a bit of leapfrogging from both sides. I'd use IE version X, then Netscape version X+1, then IE etc etc. So Netscape definitely faced situations previously where they were no longer the best browser. As you note, what really started killing them was IE finding its way automatically into nearly every single home computer on the market, and the fact that for many people "the internet" and "the blue E" were synonymous (Stories were legion of people who thought their internet was broken because the IE shortcut was removed from their screen).
As someone who hasn't used Windows since right around that time (I was Linux/FreeBSD only for several years until transitioning to OSX) that ushered in a dark area - there were many websites that I simply couldn't use. Their loss, not mine.
Another aspect that is often overlooked is Microsoft's decision to closely couple IE with Windows. On Windows, the installed IE version was used within third-party applications as part of the standard application SDKs provided by Microsoft. For example, any QuickBooks user can tell you stories about IE security settings affecting their accounting software in a negative fashion. This made it difficult for Microsoft to iterate IE, because so many applications relied on proprietary aspects of IE's rendering engine.
NS betting the farm on JavaScript Style Sheets and a strictly-hierarchical element access tree certainly didn't help matters (and the CSS-to-JSSS translation layer never really worked). Your CSS had to allow for every possible hierarchy in which the target element(s) could be found. Developing for it was largely a matter of figuring out why the hell that one paragraph/bullet point/header/table cell didn't look anything at all like the ones around it, and knowing you weren't going to like the answer when you found it. ("Oh, I see... changing the font colour here overrides the font size I set back there. Makes sense...???")
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The truth is more shaded than saying they held back the web. What I remember is that IE 5 came out in 1999, and was a significantly better browser than netscape 4, which was my favorite browser at the time. So, netscape had an inferior product. Meanwhile microsoft also decided to bundle IE with windows, for free, on all new PC's. So netscape had a worse product and worse user acquisition. If you're a startup in that position, what is the logical thing to do? Well, netscape decided the most logical thing was to start a multi-year rewrite of their entire product, with the goal of having an identical UI, but a fresh codebase. IMHO, it is fair to say microsoft helped netscape into the grave, but it is also fair to say netscape did much of the walking.
So, from about 2000 until about 2006 IE was the only game in town because there just weren't any viable competitors (well, ok, there was opera, but...). Looking around and noticing they didn't have competition, microsoft figured they didn't need to iterate their product, so they didn't.
Now, this will sound strange to say now, but IE 6 had the best standards support, in 2001. However, it also had a lot of proprietary features which made things easy to do that were hard to do using W3C standards, which as standards tend to be weren't as developer-friendly as they could have been (I still think CSS's layout model is a big mistake). Web developers being web developers they couldn't resist those features to build stuff quicker, and they ended up building a lot of IE-only sites, which created the legacy which we are still battling today. And that made it very hard for upstart browsers like firefox to gain marketshare.
Now, again IMHO, it is fair to say microsoft did nothing to discourage people from using those proprietary features and getting locked into a dead-end platform. However, it is also fair to say you could and can build a standards-compliant codebase which is IE 6 compatible so developers were helping the jailer put on the chains.
I think blaming it all on MS is easy but inaccurate. It was a shared blame across netscape, microsoft and the web development community of the early 2000's, which ended up in a stagnated browser market from 2000 to 2005/2006.
No, it's pretty accurate. When you gain a monopoly and people stop testing on other browsers, you create a big problem. I never stopped using Netscape/Mozilla. It doesn't matter if IE was better for a period of time. Once it became dominant and incompatible, all other browsers fought a huge uphill battle. IE is still the most widely used desktop browser.
This is unfortunately starting to happen once again with Chrome.
The irony is that many sites now have poor compatibility with IE due to using proprietary webkit-only CSS styles. On mobile it's even worse, with most "mobile optimized" sites being broken even on firefox and opera. Even big sites perform poorly. Engadget's mobile version is broken on anything that's not webkit. It is frustrating to see that people never learn. They're quite happy to change jailers, but quite unwilling to free themselves.
Yeah, it's gotten to the point that some alternative mobile browsers are starting to support -webkit- prefixes.
Up until IE5 I remember being a bit of leapfrogging from both sides. I'd use IE version X, then Netscape version X+1, then IE etc etc. So Netscape definitely faced situations previously where they were no longer the best browser. As you note, what really started killing them was IE finding its way automatically into nearly every single home computer on the market, and the fact that for many people "the internet" and "the blue E" were synonymous (Stories were legion of people who thought their internet was broken because the IE shortcut was removed from their screen).
As someone who hasn't used Windows since right around that time (I was Linux/FreeBSD only for several years until transitioning to OSX) that ushered in a dark area - there were many websites that I simply couldn't use. Their loss, not mine.
Another aspect that is often overlooked is Microsoft's decision to closely couple IE with Windows. On Windows, the installed IE version was used within third-party applications as part of the standard application SDKs provided by Microsoft. For example, any QuickBooks user can tell you stories about IE security settings affecting their accounting software in a negative fashion. This made it difficult for Microsoft to iterate IE, because so many applications relied on proprietary aspects of IE's rendering engine.
NS betting the farm on JavaScript Style Sheets and a strictly-hierarchical element access tree certainly didn't help matters (and the CSS-to-JSSS translation layer never really worked). Your CSS had to allow for every possible hierarchy in which the target element(s) could be found. Developing for it was largely a matter of figuring out why the hell that one paragraph/bullet point/header/table cell didn't look anything at all like the ones around it, and knowing you weren't going to like the answer when you found it. ("Oh, I see... changing the font colour here overrides the font size I set back there. Makes sense...???")