alt Hacker NewsThe MA hate is real and well deserved but there actually was a period of time where IE was the browser of choice for all the right reasons. People forget that part, but Microsoft has really made good products when they want to.
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icedchai • yesterday at 7:23 PM
It was a rough time. IE was the only browser that worked well.
Netscape 4.x crashed every 20 minutes. Mozilla (before Firefox) was barely usable. Chrome was no where to be seen yet.
Plus IE got the box model right in the first place. It really was a good browser and had an interesting design with COM / MSHTML for embedding. The problem really was that it stagnated and had no real competition until Chrome (even though Firefox was slowly gaining traction)
Plus during this time there was little competition on the desktop market in general. iPhone and smart phones, and the Apple resurgence, was yet to come.