It was strong-armed because Gates used family connections to negotiate a preferential deal for DOS with IBM, and then forced PC manufacturers to bundle DOS and/or Windows.

That was then leveraged into attempts to force Internet Explorer onto Internet users. Which was when the antitrust suit happened.

Meanwhile IE and Windows were notorious for being terrible pieces of software.

Windows was always horrifically buggy and crash prone - far behind even the most basic standards of professional reliability. 3.x was sort of usable but extremely simple, 9x was just horrific, and it wasn't until XP that it became almost reliable.

Both IE and Windows were also a security disaster.

Between the bugs and the security flaws Microsoft wasted countless person-centuries for its users.

The one thing that MS did right was create a standard for PC software. That was the real value of Windows - not the awfulness of the product but the ecosystem around it, which created Visual Basic for beginner devs and Windows C++ classes for more experienced devs, and kick-started a good number of bedroom/small-scale startup businesses.

For context, PCs at this time were also extremely expensive. The price of a Mac Classic got you a brain damaged 80286 and not much RAM. You had to spend $3k or more to get the newer 80386, and the 486/66 was just starting to become available.

> Windows was always horrifically buggy and crash prone

At the time Mac OS didn't have memory protection -- Netscape would make your whole computer go BOOM at regular intervals.

IE was even a hell of a lot more stable (and faster) than Netscape.

I put a fresh copy of Redhat on the Internet in 90s and it was p0wned in 5 minutes.

That's just the way things were.

> Meanwhile IE and Windows were notorious for being terrible pieces of software.

My feeling of IE3 to IE6 (at its release time) is that (anti-competitive strategies aside), many (most?) average consumers would very likely choose IE over Netscape if they gave both a bit of a test drive.

In 1996 (maybe 1997) I was 14/15 at the time and remember coming to the conclusion that IE3 ran much faster on Windows 95 compared to Netscape.

It being (anticompetitively) free helped, but on the 100Mhz Pentiums with 8MB of RAM in our computer lab, you’d be a masochist to choose Netscape over it for random web browsing.

IE4 was quite resource intensive, but because MS anticompetitively pre-loaded it on OS startup, it still started faster than Netscape.

IE6 I found pleasant to use and it wasn’t until Firefox came out with tabs (Opera had them earlier, but you would often encounter websites it wouldn’t render properly, probably due to IE targeted design), that IE lost its sheen for me.

Firefox was popular enough that developers started caring about standards compliant websites at which point IE started entering the “despised” category, but it may not have actually been displaced from its top spot were it not for Chrome.