Adding to that, there's an argument to be made that the browser ballot helped make the Web a much richer place.
The reason I say that is that it allowed Chrome to make serious inroads and become a much more dominant browser. Chrome comes from Google, a company whose entire business model revolves around getting people to spend more time on the Web. So they have a vested interest in pushing the Web toward being as rich a content platform as possible so that people spend more time in their Web browser and not in other applications.
So they did that. They made Javascript more performant, they pushed new standards for producing more attractive and responsive pages, etc. And makers of other browsers, who might not have done the same because they're not driven by similar incentives, had to start hurrying to keep up.
The reason I say that is that it allowed Chrome to make serious inroads and become a much more dominant browser. Chrome comes from Google, a company whose entire business model revolves around getting people to spend more time on the Web. So they have a vested interest in pushing the Web toward being as rich a content platform as possible so that people spend more time in their Web browser and not in other applications.
So they did that. They made Javascript more performant, they pushed new standards for producing more attractive and responsive pages, etc. And makers of other browsers, who might not have done the same because they're not driven by similar incentives, had to start hurrying to keep up.