I'm too young to be any kind of oracle on IE and it's history, however I'm personally glad that IE was already fading away by the time I began my software engineering career. This is because, from the stories I've heard from older colleagues, IE rapidly turned into another loser EEE Microsoft boondoggle; trying to own the ecosystem and crush competition by:
1. Moving standards so fast, so randomly, and so opaquely, that nobody can keep up.
2. Abusing market share and WinOS (then sued for it)
3. Etc...
In my eyes, IE was never going to recover from all of that bad blood. It was ill-fated and doomed to die once greed took a hold.
I think the biggest pain of IE was there were few standards at all and the ones it did support it moved extremely slowly on. E.g. if you wanted to something as basic as add a drop shadow to an element you would do it with a DirectX filter. Sure, it was available before a standards process figured it out... but implemented in such a proprietary way Microsoft didn't even bother trying to put such functionality into the version of IE for Mac. In the meantime, anyone that wanted to move to the much simpler CSS way had to write two versions to do so as it took IE a long time to get the standards implementations and then a long time for the users to actually upgrade.
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I'm too young to be any kind of oracle on IE and it's history, however I'm personally glad that IE was already fading away by the time I began my software engineering career. This is because, from the stories I've heard from older colleagues, IE rapidly turned into another loser EEE Microsoft boondoggle; trying to own the ecosystem and crush competition by:
1. Moving standards so fast, so randomly, and so opaquely, that nobody can keep up.
2. Abusing market share and WinOS (then sued for it)
3. Etc...
In my eyes, IE was never going to recover from all of that bad blood. It was ill-fated and doomed to die once greed took a hold.
I think the biggest pain of IE was there were few standards at all and the ones it did support it moved extremely slowly on. E.g. if you wanted to something as basic as add a drop shadow to an element you would do it with a DirectX filter. Sure, it was available before a standards process figured it out... but implemented in such a proprietary way Microsoft didn't even bother trying to put such functionality into the version of IE for Mac. In the meantime, anyone that wanted to move to the much simpler CSS way had to write two versions to do so as it took IE a long time to get the standards implementations and then a long time for the users to actually upgrade.
Microsoft itself should never recover from this bad blood either.
When you get a bully on the ground, you keep kicking and you don’t stop. Otherwise they’ll just come back and make you wish you’d never been born.