Now, what would people then use to view PDFs ? One of these commercialware PDF viewers, bug-ridden and with an infinite supply of zero days ? Or would they use libpoppler, chock-full of nasty C constructs like "void*" instead of proper generic programming ? Besides libpoppler and the commercialware dreck there are very few PDF renderers. Maybe you take the time to research the situation and maybe you will figure Mozilla is actually one of the more secure alternatives when it comes to renderers.
Having said that, generally cyberspace could be made much, much more secure. JavaScript and C, being often used in a shitty-typed way are both major security risks. PHP is even worse, for similar reasons.

The age of Algol, Burroughs, ELBRUS, ICL was probably more secure than the craptastic, marketing-driven IT world we have since Unix and C.

And no, not a mainframe guy, I grew up with C and HP Unix, but my intelligence allowed me to question my upbringing, so to speak.

Can we have "computer system archeology" in order to learn for a better future ???

It would be much better folks ran Adobe Reader. NOOOT !

...from the propaganda specialists hired by some big corporation.

"Microsoft dev tools are either free or really cheap"
So true. MSVC 2008 was an excellent IDE, and then they turned it into crap by re-writing it in C#. So indeed "cheap".

MS actually could do a killing business by selling "Windows XP extended usage fee - 50 Dollars per annum per seat". Many if not most customers would shell out the money for the convenience of not having to perform an upgrade that gives ZERO VALUE. Actually, Vista and Win7 destroyed value because people had to relearn perfectly well-working processes. Win8 doubled down on the destruction.
Adam Smith woke up in his grave and his wrath destroyed major parts of the Wintel business.
Really, how can you be so incredibly stupid not to milk the money machine "Windows XP" and replace it by value-destructors ???

It also helps to drive all the adults to Apple, if they can afford it. It is actually amazing how MSFT managed to damage their PC business. But little wonder, given how they attempted to shove Win8 down the throats of their customers.
A smart business owner does not do shoving, instead he makes his customers do the shoving THEMSELVES. A smart business owner would have silently killed Win8 and continued to sell Win7. Then develop Win7 2.0 as an incremental improvement and call it Win9 or Win10.
Finally, smart folks know their strengths and leverage them. After Snowden, MS could have nailed Google and Amazon to the wall. But no, all they can do is to emulate the leaders in the cloudy business. What Kindergarten develops, the Corporation manages to destroy in terms of rationality.

There is a crapload of alternative GUI toolkits by now. Even if they managed to destroy Qt, the rest of the world would only be affected minimally. Many user companies would even be able to build their own GUI toolkit and in the process fix a lot of deficiencies.

You can shit-talk your own company in the forest with your wife, but only if she is an ex-NKVD officer and capable of keeping her mouth shut at all times. On all other occasions, including your exec suite you DO NOT shit-talk your own company.
How can your customers trust in your products if you do not trust them ???
I do NOT think Elop was evil, I think he was just a moron who was way too incompetent for running a major corporation. Also see what Napoleon had to say on this subject.

Bingo. The phone business was transformed from a hw business to a sw business by means of the iPhone and its clone Android. The American corporations had much deeper knowledge and experience in this business than Nokia. Apple and Google simply turned their sw engineering teams on making phones software with totally new capabilities and new business models, new application distribution models, always on internet and the like. Before Apple, nobody had a reasonable internet traffic plan and Nokia was too anxious to push IP networking because that would threaten the SMS business.
Euro statism against American capitalism. Who wins out 10 out of 10 times ?

Yeah Mr Elop, so you avoided battle in order to jump off a cliff in orderly fashion ?
Guaranteed death is better than a chance to win the war ?
Well-made Android phones can indeed command a serious price. That would HAVE been an option for Nokia.

I once worked with an ex Msft manager. Let me put it this way - he was not great a great thinker and analyst.

You know why this is the case ? Because MS products actually look cheap. Very cheap. But their price sticker is not as cheap as Asus, Acer and the like. Compare that to Apple, who really ensure all the details are nice. From mechanical work to software ergonomics. Nobody wants to waste their life with ugly products, if they can afford a better one. Also, their sales sucks donkey balls as compared to Apple stores. At least here in the land of the automobile. You cannot even test their browser in the local mall. At Apple store I can. Why would I want a cheap-looking product which might come with a slow browser ? MSFT are really big time idiots.

German sw engineer here. We had a whatsapp-like app in 2006 running on J2ME. Nokia did not want it, "because it might offend our main customer's (the telcos) SMS business". They essentially traded a few fat years for their future by not even being willing to discuss an innovative idea. Imagine if the world would use NokiaChat instead of WhatsApp. And sure as hell some smart folks here would have been able to build them a Facebook competitor. But alas, I assume all those smart folks are now at Google and the city of London, doing finance work...

If these idiots had opened their S40 platform for C++ (or some sort of Algol/Pascal/Ada), they could have made a killing business. Instead they only allowed the J2ME crapola on this great platform. Euro disease in action (too many collectivist here who think that cake slicing is more important than cake making). If a German guy comes up with a great idea, you bet American businesses will snap it up while the German companies will label him a weird guy. The actually productive and creative folks are sandwiched between collectivists and a braindead, politically correct managerial class.

Oh boy. You really need to travel the world a bit. As a first step, read how the Chinese spanked more than one power in the last 100 years. They had a complex state when your forefathers still ran through the forests of Germany along with my forefathers. Chasing wild animals.