IE6 was actually just an incremental improvement on IE5 and IE4 before it. IE4 was the really important leap.
Story time:
IE3 and NN3 both had small amounts of programmability via JavaScript - you could change the src of an image, you could inspect and modify form values, you could navigate the page, or completely clear its contents and rewrite it as a string. Oh, and also alert(), confirm(), and prompt().
IE4 and NN4 came out at roughly the same time. But in IE4, they took this idea of small amounts of programmability, and generalized it to the entire document. IE4 introduced the idea that every HTML node should be programmable and interactive in a generalized way. If you knew the HTML properties for an element, you already knew its programmatic interface. It was a simple, powerful idea that hasn't been improved dramatically since.
NN4, on the other hand, introduced this ridiculous hack called 'layers'. You could create these floating layers, and write into them using document.write(). That was the only dynamic mechanism in NN4 above what NN3 had.
So IE4 introduced a powerful and simple generalization of the platform, and NN4 introduced an ugly hack. Surprisingly, developers preferred IE. On top of that IE4, was rock solid and NN4 was crashy.
It's true that Microsoft abused their monolopy position, but the part of the story everyone forgets is that they also more or less invented the modern web in IE4.
Yup. You toss it off as a short comment, but the stability and performance aspects of IE4 and Netscape 4 shouldn't be ignored. Netscape was super-crashy, and bloated, and slow, and development pace had slowed to a crawl. This was the age of Netscape Communicator suite version 4.2b preview release candidate 3 Gold (you think I'm kidding but this is hardly an embellishment of the reality). IE4 was solid, less bloated, and faster. And better maintained.
Microsoft abused its monopolies in various ways, that's for sure, but it won the browser war by hitting Netscape when stumbled right where it hurt the most, with a higher quality competing product.
Story time:
IE3 and NN3 both had small amounts of programmability via JavaScript - you could change the src of an image, you could inspect and modify form values, you could navigate the page, or completely clear its contents and rewrite it as a string. Oh, and also alert(), confirm(), and prompt().
IE4 and NN4 came out at roughly the same time. But in IE4, they took this idea of small amounts of programmability, and generalized it to the entire document. IE4 introduced the idea that every HTML node should be programmable and interactive in a generalized way. If you knew the HTML properties for an element, you already knew its programmatic interface. It was a simple, powerful idea that hasn't been improved dramatically since.
NN4, on the other hand, introduced this ridiculous hack called 'layers'. You could create these floating layers, and write into them using document.write(). That was the only dynamic mechanism in NN4 above what NN3 had.
So IE4 introduced a powerful and simple generalization of the platform, and NN4 introduced an ugly hack. Surprisingly, developers preferred IE. On top of that IE4, was rock solid and NN4 was crashy.
It's true that Microsoft abused their monolopy position, but the part of the story everyone forgets is that they also more or less invented the modern web in IE4.
Sorry.