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Comment by agos | Hacker News Reader

but that is not about IE4

I see. Although filters were implemented in IE4, DirectX filters came about in IE5.5

However, the extend phase wasn't just IE4. They stopped piling on all sorts of non-standard vendor lock-in stuff after IE6. By the time IE7 came out, it was clear the web is here to stay.

> They stopped piling on all sorts of non-standard vendor lock-in stuff after IE6.

IE6 also stuck around a lot longer than previous versions. It was released in 2001; IE7 didn't show up until 2006, and was an optional update which many users skipped.

Many forget that IE was basically the only decent browser for most of the early 2000's. It was the defacto standard. Netscape 4.x was ancient and crashed every half hour. Mozilla/Firefox wasn't stable yet. Chrome wasn't out.

There was even an unpleasant period in the early 2000s where MSIE was the only viable browser on Mac OS. Safari and Firefox hadn't been released yet, Netscape 4.x never made the jump to OS X, and ports of the Mozilla suite were never particularly usable on the platform.

Yes, but the mac version had a better engine than ie on windows.

I jumped ship when ME came out. KDE had a good browser (Konqueror), the engine of which is now known as WebKit and powers Safari. When I wasn't using Konqueror I ran NN or whatever Mozilla version they had in the day. It worked great but ran slow and was a huge memory hog.

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