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this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2026
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Fuck AI
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uhhh.... not exactly the best example, since Internet Explorer reached over 90% market share by replacing Netscape Navigator and was the dominant browser for over a decade. Everybody used it. It took Chrome years to get a foothold.
Mind you, early IE was very competitive with Netscape. It was only after they had outcompeted Netscape and introduced the abomination that was ActiveX that IE became the shambling corpse of a browser that we remember.
Heck, some of IE's reputation is because of ActiveX applets that only ran in IE6 and kept being used for years and years. (Not that later versions of IE were good but IE6 specifically casted a very long shadow and held back the Web for ages.)
There were also compatibility issues with the "CSS box model", where IE6 didn't follow the spec at all and broke nearly every site in every other browser because elements ended up with different sizes.
They fixed that with IE7, and we finally entered the utopia CSS promised with every browser agreeing on how to size elements.
And then everybody realised the CSS defaults were wrong, and the IE6 behaviour actually made more sense, and now pretty much any complicated site will opt back into the IE6 box model.
Yeah, I feel like in general IE kinda gets a bad rep nowadays because of it's very very slow corporate demise but it really was an innovator at it's start. Heck, IE4 allows you to integrate it in Win95 & NT4 and patch explorer.exe, enabling forward/back buttons, multimedia, and all kinds of web features when browsing folders. It's a UI standard that's still present in Win 11, 29 years later.
EDIT: Oops... Okay, yeah, I deserve the downvotes there. Perhaps I was a little too enthused about what brought years of stagnation and backbreaking workarounds to the web. But it's hard to understate how game-changing the address bar was to explorer.exe. It was like a whole new OS.
More like the last years of IE
oh! oh! Edge pre-Chromium