Adam Mosseri:
Second, threads posted by me and a few members of the Threads team will be available on other fediverse platforms like Mastodon starting this week. This test is a small but meaningful step towards making Threads interoperable with other apps using ActivityPub — we’re committed to doing this so that people can find community and engage with the content most relevant to them, no matter what app they use.
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.