This is somewhat disingenuous. IE was trying to strong arm web standards in much the way that chrome does today. Just back then, few folks would have it from ms. That said, div, span, xmlhttprequest... All of those came from ie, if I am not mistaken.

Now, I confess I have grown to not like divs and spans. That said, I am very amenable to "border-box", which is kind of hilarious in historical context.

I also remember IE actually supported fieldset and legend in sane ways well before netscape. Which was very annoying.

Actually, my memory is essentially that the IE team was doing decent work. The Netscape team was faltering. Only reason folks didn't like the IE team is the rest of MS was acting in very bad faith with clear embrace and extinguish as a goal for the browser market. Which ultimately left Opera as the biggest loser who otherwise had an amazing product.