> IE was cutting edge until Firefox.

I was there. I call bullshit. Competitors like Opera and IE for Mac (a completely different codebase and product) could do alpha-transparent images in the background, CSS sibling selectors, display:table-* and dozens more. For a few fortunate Web developers who were strong willed enough to heed the call from Alistapart to standards compliant code, we were able to circumvent the lack of "cutting edge" features – typically already published years ago – by employing HTC <http://enwp.org/HTML_Components> and hiding this from other browsers with conditional comments. Nowadays this would be called a polyfill.

The reality is that IE suffered immense neglect.