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Comment by GrumpyNl | Hacker News Reader

He forgot to mention that it wasnt a "great" product, they left us frontend developers with several headaches.

ie quickly became revolutionarily better than the alternatives at the time.

My team at the time held contests to find the shortest html that would crash Netscape. There was a hallway at the office with over 100 Netscape crashers printed out and pinned to the wall.

By the time ie5 was released, almost 1/3 of the frontend code existed to work around netscape bugs. It was standard for us to fingerprint point releases of netscape to work around bugs.

Yep. IE took off not just because of Microsoft's position as the default browser, but because Netscape totally sucked on Windows. I'd switched to IE2 because the Netscape build my ISP offered was horrible and constantly crashed.

Yeah, I've literally spent months of my life hunting the html sequences causing netscape to crash. It was viscerally loathed by my team. Particularly the fragility around tables... good thing it was hilariously fragile with css too!

You can still see remnants of some of it online, eg this

http://old.macedition.com/cb/nn4crashers/index.html

We were early to the idea of shipping professional apps via the browser, and it was a choppy beginning.

You’re thinking mid-2000s IE. In the 90s, IE was far ahead of everything else. The gap between 2008 IE and Chrome was FAR smaller than the gap between 1997 IE and Netscape/Mosaic

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