Edge is actually pretty decent. Native vertical tabs, M365 SSO integration, native multiple profiles with quick switching, preinstalled on your work computer and will work with anything that “only works in chrome”
Obviously this is ignoring the obvious downsides such as assisting Microsoft’s search, browser and platform monopolies, tracking data sent to Microsoft, etc. etc.
Firefox also has SSO integration with M365! Last I tested it it was less clean than Microsoft’s but it does exist and work the last time I used it
Edit: just tested on a fresh install of Firefox and it worked perfectly. Checked the checkbox under Settings>Privacy and Security for “Allow Windows single sign-in for Microsoft, work, and school accounts” then navigated to my account.microsoft.com and it immediately signed me in (and appeared to be faster than on Edge‽)
Can’t wait to see in 5 years while all of the LLM nonsense quietly gets shuffled further and further to the back until it’s gone like Cortana or Paint3D
Meanwhile has anyone noticed Microsoft has unhidden some genuinely useful older menus like Control Panel? Earlier in the windows 10 lifespan you couldn’t search for control panel and had to instead use constantly changing shortcuts and tooltips to gain access to it, but now you can just search for Control Panel and pull it right up. I’m not thrilled that I have to dig for the network adapter properties still but I’ll take the improvements I get
Sounds like you’re describing pure HTML5
JavaScript partially took off due to HTML’s limited functionality at the time. This was also around the time that web media was becoming really big, which before HTML5 it wasn’t easy to integrate into a webpage without turning to extra libraries or extensions