Everything sucked back then.

Then Mozilla started not sucking, then in 2008 Chrome came out and in 2009 when the popup was mandated, IE had declined to 56% market share from 90% highs years earlier.

Back then Chrome didn't exist and they didn't implement the pop up, just assigned some overview and opened some APIs.

However, the DOJ did not require Microsoft to change any of its code nor did it prevent Microsoft from tying other software with Windows in the future.

The popup came in 2009.