Bundled Internet Explorer was particularly troubling because they were promoting ActiveX as the way to provide interactive content and otherwise extend the browser, and ActiveX was very closely tied to the Windows API (so that it would be impractical to make arbitrary ActiveX controls work on other operating systems).

I didn't follow the court case and I don't know if that was a central part of it, but if it wasn't it should have been.

It's easy to think, now that JavaScript has won, that ActiveX in browsers was never going to take off, but I think there was a real risk (and as I understand it in South Korea it did reach critical mass and effectively force everyone to have access to Internet Explorer for a decade and a half).

I don't think Google have done anything similar to that with Chrome.