God that was an era. XP SP2 was a great OS, IE was the best browser, MSN was the most popular messenger, Skype was acquired, HTC's Windows CE devices were shipping real web browsers that worked over 3G.
By the end of the Ballmer era, Microsoft has lost the OS, the browser, the messenger, the meeting service and mobile.
My peeve today is how bad modern chat programs feel compared to the old instant messengers. The modern programs all feel slow and clunky in comparison. I felt that all of the messengers I used (MSN, AIM, ICQ) were more responsive than their modern day equivalents.
I remember the times when IE passed ACID test? Do we remember the ACID? http://acid2.acidtests.org/#top
Ah, what the times were those. Firefox was just gaining traction.
And I agree. Slack is sitting there, consuming over gig of memory on my computer, and Miranda NG was able to do the same functionality with cool skins and just 30 megs of ram.
Skins... Skins... We've lost even those...
Never heard about it (Europe).
Yes, I've just checked, even in 2009 you still have IE over 64% of browser usage.
Just checked your link and this fits with what I thought in terms of marketshare. You can see that Firefox was ~25% of marketshare in 2009. Which is an enormous share of the pie when you consider that they couldn't stick a download link on the front page of the most dominant search engine, and it didn't come preinstalled.
Never used Maxthon.
Damn, this also reminded me that RSS feeds were everywhere back then, and the browser supported it directly.
The internet was awesome.
TBF I should have said 'most popular' for all those categories.