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> ... IE6 introduced a lot of useful features back then.

Cannot agree more. People tend to forget things like AJAX came from IE.

But they probably did it by mistake or at least inadvertently. If they had known what would occur they probably won't have done it.

> But they probably did it by mistake or at least inadvertently.

Agreed.

> If they had known what would occur they probably won't have done it.

Huh?

If by "mistake", you mean trying to get a mail client to run well over the web ...

As someone who was using "AJAX" quite extensively using hidden IFRAMEs and then in 1999, XMLHttpRequest -- long before a Johnny-come-lately coined AJAX, I had to comment on this-

http://www.yafla.com/dennisforbes/How-I-Came-To-Despise-AJAX...

It was first added "to" Internet Explorer by the MSXML team (by a guy sneaking in some functionality for the Exchange Outlook Web Access team). It was actually a great example of the power of modular "ActiveX" (which in that case was abused to mean simply COM) scripting -- they didn't need to release a new browser to support it. Of course there are endless downsides to reusing a plug-in structure that had little controls or security, however it did have some merits.

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