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Comment by rimantas | Hacker News Reader

  > Think MSIE. For a long time it was a horrible browser,
  > but held its market-share simply by being the default.

That's not entirely true. IE since about ~4 was the best browser around (I choose to ignore IE5 for Mac). NN4 was horrible. The problem with IE was that it stagnated, so when Firefox came out it soon started to kick IEs ass and only then the "default" part became a problem.

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IE5 for Mac was fantastic in terms of standards support. It was quite literally a joke in the CSS WG for a while that something from some old abandoned draft would be discussed for weeks and then eventually we'd decide to do what IE5 for Mac did a decade earlier.

Back then, people upgraded to FireFox because they wanted their fancy backgrounds to work in MySpace. I'm not even joking.

wow thanks for the nostalgia trip. you're actually right though i think i remember seeing badges on certain myspace pages that suggested you install firefox to see the page correctly.

Really? I remember Netscape being hands down better than IE, but that might have been after Netscape went out of business and before Mozilla formed, so maybe around when IE4 came out in other words.

I was a webdev back during the 90's browserwars, and I can confirm that Netscape 4 was terrible (despite not wanting to admit it), IE4 was better and IE5 was pretty good.

There was no Netscape 5, and Netscape 6 was an abomination. It wasn't until Phoenix (the Firefox predecessor) that IE had anything to worry about. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_web_browsers

Netscape before 4 kicked ass. Netscape 4 was terrible. Netscape 6 was late.

Ah the "Mariner" cancellation fiasco.

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