I was under the impression that IE5 for Mac (with its Tasman rendering engine) was the most standard compliant browser at that time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasman_(layout_engine)

And it proved how ahead of its time it was by also being abandoned by Microsoft before they allowed IE6 to stagnate on Windows when they realised that good browsers and a viable web weren't in their business interests.

The author is correct that if Micrsoft went full bore for web standards, not only would they be commiting suicide by undermining their own Office and desktop OS monopolies, they'd destroy Adobe in the process. Luckily for Adobe they're not taking that course.

(I really can't tell if you're serious about thanking Microsoft for AJAX, being forced to build rickety technologies on top of whatever random ActiveX functionality they leave lying around isn't something I'm thankful for)

Well, they have done some innovation, but my memory includes them buying a C compiler company, buying an operating system, hiring Cutler to do an OS after he had already done two or three, doing C# which looks a lot like java in most all respects (and hiring the author of Turbo Pascal to do that). My recollection is also that they have been very behind on the web, and may still be.

So in my book they are a bit behind in the innovation department.

IE 5 was some time ago. A more recent view on the approach to standards is at http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/03/02/On-OOXML particularly in the paragraph titled "Con: Standards Process Abuse".