The standard in patents is whether it contains an inventive step not obvious to an average working in that field. That seems to mean in practise that unless it's the sort of thing that worker would come up with in a few minutes it's an inventive step. While the browser could be regarded as an evolution of Lotus Notes and all the other examples you mentioned it is also not really identical to the modern browser.
In fact the idea of hyperlinks as distinct from these examples is probably a sufficient inventive step. After all it is hard to believe the average programmer at the time could envisage IE from Lotus Notes or before. In a broad sense yes but if the broad claims are knocked out the patent holder should be able to retain some more narrow claims. If he has anything left Microsoft is still in the same boat. Most inventions are broadly not inventive, and we hear all the time people say that they could have thought of something. While I'm sympathetic to the idea it looks a lot stronger to me than this article is saying.