They stopped piling on all sorts of non-standard vendor lock-in stuff after IE6.
IE6 also stuck around a lot longer than previous versions. It was released in 2001; IE7 didn't show up until 2006, and was an optional update which many users skipped.
Many forget that IE was basically the only decent browser for most of the early 2000's. It was the defacto standard. Netscape 4.x was ancient and crashed every half hour. Mozilla/Firefox wasn't stable yet. Chrome wasn't out.
There was even an unpleasant period in the early 2000s where MSIE was the only viable browser on Mac OS. Safari and Firefox hadn't been released yet, Netscape 4.x never made the jump to OS X, and ports of the Mozilla suite were never particularly usable on the platform.
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IE6 also stuck around a lot longer than previous versions. It was released in 2001; IE7 didn't show up until 2006, and was an optional update which many users skipped.
Many forget that IE was basically the only decent browser for most of the early 2000's. It was the defacto standard. Netscape 4.x was ancient and crashed every half hour. Mozilla/Firefox wasn't stable yet. Chrome wasn't out.
There was even an unpleasant period in the early 2000s where MSIE was the only viable browser on Mac OS. Safari and Firefox hadn't been released yet, Netscape 4.x never made the jump to OS X, and ports of the Mozilla suite were never particularly usable on the platform.