This was particularly problematic because MS struggled MIGHTILY to get Vista out the door. It was a decade of really terrible IE which was pushed out longer due to Vista's poor performance and stability.
Meanwhile, you could install firefox and later chrome and get a relatively modern internet browsing experience.
Ironically, I think the thing that hurt firefox adoption was the switch to the evergreen model. The era of firefox 3->~33 was quiet painful, updating was simply far too intrusive. "You are out of date, click here to download the latest version!". Chrome from the get go was pretty good at making that seamless.
If nothing else it primed users for adopting Chrome, which originally had a less branded, more utilitarian feel not unlike early Firefox.
This cycle is somewhat repeating itself though as Chrome has become very branded and product-y. Would love to see something similarly functionally-minded as early FF/Chrome come out and take a big bite out of Chrome’s marketshare.
They should have done what Chrome does - write the standards to match what you've implemented.
That doesn't match my memory at all, unless you include Phoenix under the Firefox umbrella. I switched … I don't remember exactly when, probably in late 2003, but certainly when it was called Phoenix, and it was such a breath of fresh air coming from IE. I'm sure there were breakages, because it was the early noughties and that's what the internet was like, but I don't remember a single time wishing for something that IE provided that Phoenix didn't.
But I was just coming to it as a user, not as a dev—maybe you're referring to the dev perspective.
I (and presumably others) hated the notion of a Microsoft/Windows-only web. Younger folks just don't realize how close we came and the debt owed to those Mozilla devs.
Mac IE became its own albatross for web development for a while once Safari hit its stride and supplanted it.
Prior to somewhere between 2003 and 2005, "web standards" were aspirational rather than the reality on the ground. There was Internet Explorer for Windows at 85-90% and all the bit players scrambling for a percentage point or two.
For the bit players, the standards were their only bid for survival since no one would tolerate putting extra dev time into an extra 1%. Together, you could make a case for a 10-15% target.
For Microsoft's part, "IE is the standard" had an extremely long tail.
Opera could probably claim best CSS in the late 90s. And by 2003, Netscape 6.0 & 7.0 and Mozilla Suite 1.0 would have better CSS 2 support than IE 6.
Netscape championed its own alternate to CSS: JSSS. Javascript-based Style Sheets.[1] But the W3C went for CSS, so the CSS implementation in Netscape 4 (1997) was very rushed, and poor quality.
This is what led to the @import hack being possible, which used different style sheets for IE and Netscape.[2][3]
[1] https://www.w3.org/submissions/1996/1/WD-jsss-960822
[2] https://litux.nl/mirror/csscookbook/0596005768/cssckbk-CHP-9...
IE championed CSS and the DOM. Netscape was fixated on bgcolor, font tags, etc. Netscape introduced the <layer> tag. IE just made every tag a potential layer. Remember AJAX? Loading content from a script and injecting it into a page? That was 100% IE.
The issue wasn't that IE 5, 5.5, and 6 were bad when they came out. They weren't. Not one bit. They were absolutely the cutting edge. Then Netscape died, Microsoft had no more competition in the field, and so they basically just stopped. For years.
Mozilla (and shortly after, Firefox) prompted an eventual response, which was IE7: I minor update to an otherwise abandoned codebase. Once it was clear folks were seriously looking at dumping IE, IE8 followed shortly after. The CSS Acid Test showed how far IE had fallen behind, so IE9 and IE10 moved to stop the bleeding. IE 11 was the final release before Microsoft finally dropped the legacy IE baggage, aka the Trident engine. By that time Chrome had stormed the field, and Edge's renderer just couldn't keep up relative to the amount of money Microsoft was willing to pay. So they dumped their own engine and moved to Blink. (If you can't beat em…)
But let's be clear, between 1998 and 2003, IE was at the forefront. Its CSS support wasn't broken. It was the best and only. Its box model wasn't broken. There were no other box models to compare it to. You didn't need to give it separate CSS, because it was the only one around really to parse it. It didn't have non-standard AJAX support. It WAS the standard since no XMLHttpRequest object existed at the time.
You could write VBScript on a web page instead of JavaScript and have a >90% chance that client could run it. Flash didn't have to be bundled or installed separately, ActiveX just took care of it in the middle of your browsing session.
It was the Bronze Age of the web. IE was the one that moved us beyond stone tools. Later supplanted by Firefox and Safari's Iron Age, but still an important and arguably necessary step toward the modern web we know today, including the box model.