> 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.

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bombcar an hour ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	icedchai 20 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		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.
	▲	adzm an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		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.