They've been doing this since 1995 with Netscape Navigator, Opera, and Mozilla.
Of course, to be fair, Opera claimed their low usage rates were because of Microsoft, but the reality was that their browser just kinda sucked. People didn't use opera because any one of the alternatives was better.
Their situation was actually competition done correctly, which muddied the waters during the browser wars.
I can't speak for earlier versions of Opera but around version 12 or so before they switched engines to webkit it was the best most feature rich browser around.
So microshits just baked explorer into the gui.
Back then pretty much all browsers were shit anyway but that was pretty much the birth.
For some inexplicable reason, the retards at Microsoft decided to reuse IE as part of their file explorer system. Hence to delete IE was to delete everything that required an active window session or adorner, so really all applications in the entire OS would have broken
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