Dude, IE was Windows-only. It went against everything the open Internet standards advocated for. And on top of it, I was a Mac guy, and Mac IE was a completely different beast, so I had to code for Windows IE, Mac IE, then Safari and Firefox and eventually early Chrome. And Windows IE was always the motherfucker who you had to figure out these nasty CSS and JS hacks for to get, forget pixel-perfect, how about pixel-similar rendering vs. other browsers.

If you wanted pixel-perfect it was a fucking nightmare. Literally doubled your work time just to add WinIE compatibility. This was in the IE5/6/7 era.

Speaking of JS... all this was made worse because there were NO good JS libraries at the time to make things easier. Debugging consisted of alerts. Eventually, Prototype (and later Jquery) were literally godsends, and there was some JS lib (forgot the name) which added a reasonable debugger (this was before browsers themselves had reasonably good integrated debuggers!)

Chrome is not like that. The same rendering engine exists on Linux, Windows and Mac, and it has an open-source highly-compatible version, Chromium.

> and there was some JS lib (forgot the name) which added a reasonable debugger (this was before browsers themselves had reasonably good integrated debuggers!)

Firebug changed my life when it came out!

> Dude, IE was Windows-only.

Not originally it wasn’t. The UNIX versions are an interesting relic.

It was available on MacOS as well.

the grandparent post made the point that for most of its history in the late 90's and early 00's (pretty much all of the CRT iMac era), IE for Mac used an entirely different rendering engine than the Windows version. And then it was abandoned.

Up to version 5.5.

"This application is optimised for Chrome, but the default browser is Edge. Please cut and paste the following link into Chrome." Literally read this today.

That's also the case at my workplace. On some machines, IE11 was still the default browser, despite it not being supported.

Do you work for banks or something?

Chrome is open source and available on all OS. Try running IE with flash and activex on linux in 1999. People today don't know how easy they have it :) (not saying you in particular).

That's not really true; chromium is open source. Chrome, while based on chromium, is not.

Where have you seen this?

I've had sites not work in anything but chrome, specifically one of those bicycle registry sites. I think it was fixed.