«Are you suggesting some other consequence of this case, leading to stagnation of IE development?»
I think that you could see a lot of optimistic excitement from Microsoft in the idea of merging IE into Windows just prior to the antitrust case. There were experiments with using the HTML renderer everywhere in the OS from widgets (the "Active Desktop" thing) to applications (HTML Help, even the HTML usage of Windows (now File) Explorer)... Admittedly today with have mixed opinions of such experiments (and their often poor performance), but it is hard not to wonder what could have happened had Microsoft invested fully into that combined Windows/IE rendering platform had they been less afraid of the antitrust repercussions...
We're finally starting to see HTML/JS/CSS "everywhere" application toolkits (it's a vertical slice in the "Universal Windows Platform", and then there's efforts like Electron and Cordova), and it's interesting to think that maybe some of that would have happened sooner in a world without that antitrust lawsuit. (Certainly the counter is that it would have been less standardized, but I don't think that is necessarily the case, either: it would have largely have been different standards though.)
I think that you could see a lot of optimistic excitement from Microsoft in the idea of merging IE into Windows just prior to the antitrust case. There were experiments with using the HTML renderer everywhere in the OS from widgets (the "Active Desktop" thing) to applications (HTML Help, even the HTML usage of Windows (now File) Explorer)... Admittedly today with have mixed opinions of such experiments (and their often poor performance), but it is hard not to wonder what could have happened had Microsoft invested fully into that combined Windows/IE rendering platform had they been less afraid of the antitrust repercussions...
We're finally starting to see HTML/JS/CSS "everywhere" application toolkits (it's a vertical slice in the "Universal Windows Platform", and then there's efforts like Electron and Cordova), and it's interesting to think that maybe some of that would have happened sooner in a world without that antitrust lawsuit. (Certainly the counter is that it would have been less standardized, but I don't think that is necessarily the case, either: it would have largely have been different standards though.)