The implication is that absent the consent decree IE would have been <i>more</i> dominant in that era, and that the dominance would have lasted longer than it did. This is plausible, since a world of sites built with non-web-standard crap would have been barren ground for nascent Firefox. It was for that exact purpose that IE has always been the way it has been, and would have been worse without the decree. Yeah, we&#x27;re grateful for XHR, but that was just the tip of the iceberg.