OK, if you really think Safari is worse than dealing with IE hacks you probably were not writing anything for the web back then. This was already a tenuous argument, but come on.

OS lock-in and slow adoption of new web features is perhaps lame but Safari doesn't have anything even approaching it's own box model, or `-ms-filter` equivalent, or quirks mode... the list approaches infinity.

Also, "install something else?" Do you know what the browser landscape looked like back then? IE had >80% dominance for years, and your other option was Netscape, which lacked huge swaths of custom features in IE.