"The final thing that happened, the final key event was that Microsoft did absolutely nothing for 5 years in this space. There are a lot of web-developers who criticize Microsoft for having left the field and abandoned the web, but it actually had a huge benefit, which was that during the 'browser wars' [Netscape and Internet Explorer] both of the browser vendors were pumping bugs into the web at a furious rate and bugs in the web don't go away very quickly. It takes years for them to be flushed out, so with each new release, while there was the promise of fixing old bugs ... the old bugs actually remained because you cannot depend on everybody upgrading to accept the new things and each of those upgrades would include new bugs; so the bug-list was constantly growing and it took years for it to shrink. And that shrinkage occurred over the five years from 2000 to 2005. That was what allowed the browser to become stable enough to become an application platform. Prior to that time, all the technology necessary for doing Ajax was already in the field but it was too unstable to allow for application development. So by doing nothing, Microsoft allowed Ajax to happen. And I think that is maybe the best thing that Microsoft has ever done."

From:
Douglas Crockford: The JavaScript Programming Language
   • Douglas Crockford: The JavaScript Pro...