Base FTP/Gopher/WebDAV "file browsing" was at the time definitely seen as a common browser feature. It was much lamented when Firefox dropped those features and left them to be plugins/external applications.

Most "help" is just webpages or ebooks today. All Microsoft did with "HTML Help" was essentially a very early version of EPUB.

I think these are very strange things to complain about.

I'm not sure about some of the other claims either.

The AntiVirus claims set Windows virus/malware safety back by like a decade. Needing to install Security Essentials into XP/Vista instead of it just being out-of-the-box probably cost a lot more dollars to Windows users than if the court had agreed that such security concerns were the domain of the operating system.

The PDF claims that Office shouldn't be allowed to directly export to PDF because that was the domain of paid add-ins also seem silly from 2020.

I find your viewpoint rather confusing and I'm not sure I see it at all. The browser primarily exists to traverse hyperlinked documents on the internet, which we call the "web". Though we've built plenty of "apps" now on top of hyperlinked documents, for the most part that remains arguably a secondary or tertiary reason for the browser to exist, and even if you could argue that secondary usage has rose to prominence to eclipse the primary reason for the existence of the browser, the use of the web for "apps" certainly has a lot less to do with Windows package management specifically and instead the convenience of simple, standardized client-server communications and development patterns that arise from that original primary usage goal of hyperlinked documents in a web of servers.

Web "apps" seem to only increase cross-platform interests, rather than serve to "smooth deficiencies" in a single platform.

> you can see why more competition among OSes would result in the browser being LESS important, not more!

We've seen exactly the opposite in practice: a ton of web "app" innovation occurred when there were a variety mobile "smartphone" OSes with reasonably modern browsers whereas development has shifted much further back to OS-specific apps as mobile devices have calcified into the iOS/Android duopoly.