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Comment by detritus | Hacker News Reader

Going a bit further back, IE 5 and 6 were the best browser by far. Strange for me to think that my now-beloved Firefox has its heritage embedded in Netscape, which at the same time as IE5 was an absolute pig.

- ed

for some reason I have it in mind as IE5.5 specifically that was The Great IE.

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I have a version of myself aged in their twenties and working in web development that really wants to stab anyone believing that IE6 was the best browser.

I won't argue that it wasn't decent at launch, but MS kept support for that browser around way too long and failed to actually roll out support for new features that customers desired. I believe it was the era of IE6 specifically that led to the proliferation of top-right-corner.jpg which was an absolute abomination.

Oh, don't get me wrong - it was a Trojan Horse, and my first ever web browsing experience was on Navigator, so it was a hard-hearted appreciation at the time.

But from my stand point then, It Just Worked.

Same for me - I started browsing the web on Mosaic and quickly switched to Netscape. I hung on during the Netscape 4.x days but at some point couldn't deny how much better IE was (I think maybe even IE 4 was already as good or better than Netscape).

I switched to IE until the Mozilla suit released and later on switched to Firefox 0.something - it was amazing how fast it was compared to both IE6 and Mozilla.

Some time around 2001 or 2002 I bought Opera (with tabs!) and that just made the internet usable.

Compared to IE5 and Netscape Navigator 4, it was a great browser!

The issue was the length of time that it stuck around for.

IE6 almost made me quit web development once it grew stagnant. It was put on the back burner at some point and they rested on their laurels until Firefox started eating IE’s market share.

As a web developer, I might have billed 3x more hours thanks to IE 6. :P

I hated it but it made me a lot of money for many years, mostly thanks to governments requiring IE 6 support. LOL

IE 4 specifically was the big milestone. MS had a lot of catch up to do (they mostly ignored Internet before that). I've written web apps in IE4 (around 2000), it was capable of dynamically generating and manipulating the dom. While Netscape 4 could barely change a color of an element without crashing.

It was IE 5.5 that was particularly a champ compared to the terrible Netscape Communicator / Netscape 4 product. I continued to regularly use Netscape 4 through those years, as I didn't like IE, and it was a real dog in most every respect. Netscape took their eye off the ball in an attempt to further build their business away from the browser (Communicator of course was their suite attempt), and failed at both things in the process.

Thanks for confirming - I wasn't sure if I was mixing up the version number with Photoshop, which 5.5 was (if memory serves) the one that fixed terribly-kerned typesetting in v5, and added some new web-export wizziness.

There's an old post about that by Joel Spolsky that I remember thinking was particularly insightful at the time:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

I also vaguely remember jwz writing about the experience of developing it.

I never got the feeling that IE was a good browser. It came by default with windows and that made it specially popular, but never good. Alternatives always looked like a better option.

Then you weren't around in the IE5-6 era. It was definitely a better browser. But then they decided IE6 could never be improved and sat on it for years.

IE was positively fantastic at the time. So much more stable, light-weight, and sane than Netscape Navigator.

As someone who used Netscape, IE and Opera back then, Netscape was unfortunately very buggy (and not just in terms of stability). It's offline cache didn't always work (i..e you could resize the window, and it would re-download things instead of using the local cache, which was very painful on 28.8 dialup!) I remember being able to browse some sites very quickly while dialed up in IE, and then later offline be able to view them more leisurely all fine in offline mode. Netscape couldn't consistently do that.

IE 5, 5.5 and 6.0 (this last one at least initially, but clearly it stayed around too long without development) were noticeably faster and more user-friendly in my experience.

Did we forget all about Mozilla already?

Nope, still using two of their products today, and waiting for the moment (as, I think, promised soon?) wherein I could donate/pay directly to/for firefox.

I don't broadly support Mozilla's aims (I also don't not - I'm an owner of a 1st-gen Firefox phone, for example), but we're just talking browsers here.

I think you proved his point. ;) He's talking about the Mozilla browser, the precursor to Firefox. (Well actually, Firefox was named Phoenix before it became Firefox.)

Firebird

Wasn't that the email client?

I think the email client was Thunderbird

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Thunderbird

The email client is still Thunderbird, it's in active development.

First Phoenix then Firebird, then they changed the name to Firefox because of the similarly named database (https://firebirdsql.org/).

Right and my memory is telling me that I was using it since one of the milestone releases, well before 0.9.5 when they added tabbed browsing.

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