[zem]

now that the world has moved on from the two-browser days, and we actually have some standards in place, there's a huge difference between "only this idiosyncratic browser" and "anything but this noncompliant browser".

[marshray]

So then just design and test with the compliant browsers and let IE users figure it out for themselves. If just a fraction of the sites had done that back during the browser wars then IE would have become a compliant browser.

[zem]

not really - during the browser wars, ie had such a large share of the market that if you didn't support it, your site was considered broken, not the browser.

[marshray]

Yes, everybody used that logic back then and it became self-fulfilling.

There were a few Mac users back then too. At one time they were influential enough that Microsoft had developed a port of IE to Mac.

[rbanffy]

They'd rather build a port than risk having Mac users demanding compatibility with their competitor.

[jlarocco]

No it didn't. If it had, it wouldn't have been a "war" - it would have just been IE just dominating. In fact, Netscape started with a massive lead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#GV...

[marshray]

I think it shows that "Works best with X" can easily turn into "Works best with Y" and nobody is better at that game than Microsoft. Almost nobody can stay in business once Microsoft decides to destroy you by bundling a copycat product for free with their monopoly OS. But still it was shortsighted of Netscape to:

a) Try to get the web hooked on nonstandard behavior such as lenient parsing.

b) Charge money for the browser.