Anyone who says "IE wasn't that good" wasn't making active use of the current browsers at the time for browsing and web development. IE had a better feature set, better development tools, and was generally just more pleasant to use than current Netscape at the time. Stuff like XHR appeared in IE first.
Of course IE eventually rotted, but it's silly to claim that low quality was actually the case or that low quality was the result of it being bundled with the OS.
It's not as if we had auto-installed monthly or weekly browser updates back then - if you were using Netscape 4 the odds were you didn't update it very often at all. If anything the odds were better that grandma's PC would get a Windows security update/service pack with IE fixes/improvements installed than a critical Netscape update.
IMO the point at which IE truly started falling behind was around when Firefox came onto the scene, and once Chrome was a thing its fate was sealed. Before that point I don't think you could realistically argue that it "wasn't that good" because there was no superior alternative out there and it got the job done.
Shipping a web view as an OS component is also a good idea in general, as demonstrated by the fact that all the major commercial OS vendors are doing it. Many apps rely on webviews and in the past major software was using IE to render HTML content (Steam, for one example)
At that point in time literally nothing would have stopped bad actors from shipping malicious Firefox extensions. IE only had that problem because it was popular.
Of course IE eventually rotted, but it's silly to claim that low quality was actually the case or that low quality was the result of it being bundled with the OS.
It's not as if we had auto-installed monthly or weekly browser updates back then - if you were using Netscape 4 the odds were you didn't update it very often at all. If anything the odds were better that grandma's PC would get a Windows security update/service pack with IE fixes/improvements installed than a critical Netscape update.
IMO the point at which IE truly started falling behind was around when Firefox came onto the scene, and once Chrome was a thing its fate was sealed. Before that point I don't think you could realistically argue that it "wasn't that good" because there was no superior alternative out there and it got the job done.
Shipping a web view as an OS component is also a good idea in general, as demonstrated by the fact that all the major commercial OS vendors are doing it. Many apps rely on webviews and in the past major software was using IE to render HTML content (Steam, for one example)