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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

Gates missed the boat with the internet. This is not going to happen a second time!

They were a little late, but did have the dominant browser for most of the 2000's. To say they "missed the boat" is a bit much. There was a dark period from 1999 to 2004 or so where IE was basically the only usable browser.

… i’m still seeing a therapist about this time period.

> but did have the dominant browser for most of the 2000's.

By offering it for "free" as part of the OS. Which they could only do because they never intended to pay the developers who wrote it.

In a classic Microsoft move they fucked over their competition, their partners and the entire ecosystem for well over a decade.

The MA hate is real and well deserved but there actually was a period of time where IE was the browser of choice for all the right reasons. People forget that part, but Microsoft has really made good products when they want to.

Plus IE got the box model right in the first place. It really was a good browser and had an interesting design with COM / MSHTML for embedding. The problem really was that it stagnated and had no real competition until Chrome (even though Firefox was slowly gaining traction)

Plus during this time there was little competition on the desktop market in general. iPhone and smart phones, and the Apple resurgence, was yet to come.

The problem was that they had no interest in having their browser abide by the standards that existed.

Yep, the IE 6 era felt like it lasted forever. It was a solid browser, relatively stable and fast (compared to Netscape, at least.) IE was also the main browser on Mac OS X for the first couple of releases!

It was a rough time. IE was the only browser that worked well.

Netscape 4.x crashed every 20 minutes. Mozilla (before Firefox) was barely usable. Chrome was no where to be seen yet.

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