Do you not remember how much of a giant leap forward IE6 was when it was introduced? Or how massively far ahead of Netscape 4.x IE 5/5.5/6 were? IE5 gave us AJAX, and its CSS support was light-years better than the competition when it was released.
I've been a die-hard Microsoft hater since I was a teenager. Even so, there was a period from 2000-2004 when I used IE, because it was so clearly better than any other browser on the Internet. I gave up Netscape reluctantly, but when it just hung on half the sites of the Internet because it was so buggy, it was time to switch.
I take it you don't remember coding <layer> tags and working with Netscape's broken & nonstandard DOM implementation either, nor laying everything out with tables and spacer GIFs because it didn't support CSS. It used to be we'd get our pages to work in IE first, and then the boss would grudgingly say "And you've gotta make it work in Netscape too." (That was actually what got me my first full-time job...they called me in for an interview and during it I worked around a nasty layers bug that they hadn't been able to figure out.)
Was IE6 really all that much of an improvement over the mozilla browser (Not Netscape, precursor to phoenix -> firebird -> firefox ) at the time? I can't remember a time were I found IE to be actually better, or even comparable until recently.
Yes Netscape was having problems around that time, good luck trying to finance the development of a complex commercial software project when your competitor is abusing its monopoly by bundling a free alternative with its operating system. You are right about the ancient history timeframe but my points are valid for everything that happened with and after version 6, you know… the point when the web and broadband really started to take off.
And you could have used Opera or the Phoenix/Firebird Firefox-precursor instead of IE6.
I've been a die-hard Microsoft hater since I was a teenager. Even so, there was a period from 2000-2004 when I used IE, because it was so clearly better than any other browser on the Internet. I gave up Netscape reluctantly, but when it just hung on half the sites of the Internet because it was so buggy, it was time to switch.
I take it you don't remember coding <layer> tags and working with Netscape's broken & nonstandard DOM implementation either, nor laying everything out with tables and spacer GIFs because it didn't support CSS. It used to be we'd get our pages to work in IE first, and then the boss would grudgingly say "And you've gotta make it work in Netscape too." (That was actually what got me my first full-time job...they called me in for an interview and during it I worked around a nasty layers bug that they hadn't been able to figure out.)