Microsoft had their Windows SpeechAPI available in IE, like what, 5.0?

    var a = new ActiveXObject("SAPI.SpVoice");

It can do TTS and Voice Recognition, locally

And don't forget MIDI and Drect3D support was introduced in IE4. Before SVG, there was a trend of VRML in the industry and VML was added to IE.

And don't forget, the very first AJAX as made possible by the IE xmlhttp object.

TIME+dHTML was cool before Flash, even before these Web2.0 and HTML5 cool kids start yammering around.

And then Microsoft killed these features with their Silverlight.