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0 pointsMBCook2y ago0 comments

I was there, I was an IE user and proponent. It was a great browser. I think it was considered one of the best when it was released in 2001.

IE 7 came out in… 2006. So IE 6 just sat there for 5 years. And it’s not like ever upgraded to 7 immediately. Lots of corporate PCs kept 6 for many years longer.

That’s why it has the reputation it does. By 2006 IE 6 was horribly behind FF by every measure. Tons of security bugs had been found. By 2010 it was a total joke but developers were still having to make the modern web work on it, somehow.

If it had been replaced in 2003 or 2004 and MS never paused development no one would remember IE 6 as a dumpster fire.

But once you get a total stranglehold on the market, you can do stuff like that.

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grodriguez1002y ago· 1 in thread

You are right in that it was way ahead of its competitors (mainly Netscape) when it launched. It had more features, much better performance, and it looked great in comparison.

But it also had an insanely huge amount of bugs, half-broken features and “I’ll just do it my way” stuff. This was also true already at launch.

Sure, if Microsoft had replaced it in 2003 or 2004, nobody would have such “fond” memories of it even today. But the bad reputation does not come only from the fact that it was not updated for a long time; it also comes from its many problems and issues.

MBCookOP2y ago

Quite true. That’s one of the reasons that having to continue to support it for so long was so horrible. If it behaved nicely even if it had been stagnant it would’ve been quite as bad.

I guess I’m sort of assuming that if they kept new releases coming those bugs would’ve been fixed anyway in time. Which is certainly not a safe assumption.

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