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IE at its core was technically very advanced, way faster than Netscape, and pushed a ton of new features.

Dynamic HTML as it was called, CSS, encryption, and so much more stuff came to IE before any of the competitors.

Then it became the IE6 we all came to know. The analogy with Chrome starting as a trail blazer and progressively taking the same trajectory is perfect, really.

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How is Chrome taking the same trajectory when it is actively developing and releasing new features?

As far as I can tell, it's still on the bleeding edge and only recently met there by new advancements from Firefox.

That is known, but the point is that IE stopped. That has been reported somewhere, can't find a useful link right now but I remember the discussions. It was reported - and what was observable matched the description - that as soon as Netscape was out Microsoft stopped pretty much all their efforts, and IE became the laggard that due to its market share prevented innovation and became a huge obstacle for quite a long time, until loss of market share and the rise of the web app forced their hand.

I can confirm this. I used to work on the IE team. Went from a team of hundreds to just a handful.

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