Torisakia wrote:You know what? I'm about to say it.
IE was a good browser. People just hate it because the internet told them to.
Nah.
IDK how much you know about Internet browser history (admittedly that is a very nerdy and niche topic but I'm exactly the type of dorkus who is into that type of stuff) but Internet Explorer fuckin deserved its reputation thanks to Internet Explorer 6 AKA the web browser that is widely considered one of the worst tech products of all time thanks to its numerous security issues (and the browser didn't abide by the principle of least privilege, meaning it ran with the same level of access as the user account you were using - a very bad thing if you got some malware and you were logged into an Administrator account), very poor support for (then-modern) web standards, general instability, and Microsoft's refusal to patch all but the most serious bugs and them ceasing development on new versions of IE until 2005 (when they announced IE7, which was fully released in October 2006, over 5 years after IE6 came out in August 2001).
I don't think I can understate this: Internet Explorer 6 was the dominant web browser during its tenure, reaching market shares of 90%, with all versions of IE having 95% market share. Probably for most people during this time, the concept of a 'web browser' was likely synonymous with 'Internet Explorer'.
But all of the mentioned aforementioned flaws of IE6 restarted the Browser Wars that had ended after Microsoft bundled IE with Windows and achieved market dominance over Netscape and is the reason why Internet Explorer's market share went from 95.48% (in the United States) in June 2004 to only 63.37% market share in June 2010. And it kept going down and down from there.
Like even if later versions of IE improved from the numerous issues and criticisms of IE6 (and they certainly did, eventually) - you can't just easily shake a reputation like that and that reputation was well-deserved.
