They also had another little "feature" planned, that they ended up withdrawing because of a backlash that probably would have turned seriously ugly. They planned to use "keywords," which IE would turn into hotlinks to Microsoft partners. Here's how they envisioned it. IE would parse a document as it loaded, and if it found a keyword, like "digital camera" it would turn it into a hotlink to whichever digital camera manufacturer paid Microsoft the most money. Essentially, they planned to have hotlinked advertising on every web page, collecting the money, and giving none to the web page creator.
MS used a lot of their "negative engineering" tactics to make IE the dominant browser. They were one of the key contributors to the World Wide Web standards organization, but deliberately made Internet Explorer non-compliant. They realized that most programmers never read the W3 standards, and just started up IE and if it worked in IE, they knew they were good to go, as IE had a huge browser share. This made W3 compliant browsers look "broken."
MS became manic about making IE the dominant browser because they were convinced that whoever had the dominant browser would control the web. Once they figured out that browsers were going to be simply a vehicle for browsing content, and not a way to control it, they lost interest.
There was another reason they were so determined to kill Netscape. Netscape announced they were going to expand Navigator into a full operating system, using the web browser to browse local files. That's why MS welded the browser into the system and installed it by default. During this time period, they were quite a bit like King Herod, determined to kill competing companies before they could become a threat.
They're not nearly as jazzed about losing market share in the browser wars as they used to be.
Hmmm. I use Opera and can use it to browse local files. However, I have not really explored using it too much in this manner as the File Manager app in KDE already works well enough as far as I can see.