Microsoft entered the market with IE.

To be specific, after failing to license Netscape Navigator, Microsoft built IE out of the existing Spyglass Mosaic project, which licensed non-code stuff from NSCA Mosaic, on which Netscape was originally based (well, both were Andreessen's projects). It's interesting how connected it all was at the start, and how quickly they tend to diverge and converge over time.

And don't forget that Internet Explorer (on Windows) supports any scripting language that the system's Windows Scripting Host supports, including Perl and Python (via ActiveState). That's where JScript and VBScript support comes from in the first place.

Of course, this pluggable language sytem wasn't very useful on the web when it was burdened with the flaws of IE6, despite its once near-ubiquity. Thankfully, web developers and browser developers alike are much better at making Javascript and the DOM work reasonably nowadays, so changing languages wouldn't provide enough benefit to justify it.

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