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Comment by dustinmoorenet | Hacker News Reader

IE 6 was trash because IE won the browser war then went home. Chrome keeps innovating. Personally (and professionally) I use Firefox, but Chrome is great too.

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According to the people who worked on IE that was never really the intention, it was just assumed from the outside. They intended to create this whole new "amazing" updated browser all baked into Windows that would be maintained and updated. Anyone old enough to remember Windows 98 would remember things like active desktop which was a precursor to this. But legal and technical issues followed and before long they had gone years without a browser update.

There's a huge difference between pushing new standards and Microsoft's lock-in strategy. Chrome pushes features that developers are eager to use, so they end up building things (perhaps unwisely) for Chrome's draft implementations. In my experience it's just the case that other browsers are usually behind, but eventually get there. This is different from Microsoft's proprietary technologies baked into IE6.

The other big reason IE 6 was trash was Microsoft's overuse of vendor-specific functionality, ignoring standards and doing things their own way. This caused people to have to sometimes develop completely different solutions to a problem for IE and the rest.

This is where Chrome and IE 6 look very similar.

It seemed to me that Microsoft hinder IE purposely. They felt they were stronger in the desktop and tried to keep computing there. They perceived the internet as a treat.

Meanwhile. Google tried to break that by funding Firefox. Eventually they decided they needed to do it themselves. They probably felt that Firefox was not moving fast enough.

Not just innovating, but all browsers are fixing bugs. IE 6 was full of positioning bugs, which meant that it was extremely hard to make something look the same in 2 browsers.

Nowadays browsers achieve pixel perfect positioning and compatibility with each other.

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