[nailer]

> Windows XP Service Pack 2. After that thing windows XP became a legend.

God that was an era. XP SP2 was a great OS, IE was the best browser, MSN was the most popular messenger, Skype was acquired, HTC's Windows CE devices were shipping real web browsers that worked over 3G.

By the end of the Ballmer era, Microsoft has lost the OS, the browser, the messenger, the meeting service and mobile.

[uep]

I agree with you on everything except the browser. I'm pretty sure I was using Firefox (or maybe Opera?) on Windows before the release of Vista. I know I was still using IE for some ActiveX web apps for a while. This was the era that I switched over to Linux full-time, but both Windows 2000 and XP were great OSes at this time. Linux was painful to adopt, but I really loved the promise of "full-control" over my computer.

My peeve today is how bad modern chat programs feel compared to the old instant messengers. The modern programs all feel slow and clunky in comparison. I felt that all of the messengers I used (MSN, AIM, ICQ) were more responsive than their modern day equivalents.

[IFC_LLC]

Boy oh boy, have we forgotten the Maxthon? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxthon

I remember the times when IE passed ACID test? Do we remember the ACID? http://acid2.acidtests.org/#top

Ah, what the times were those. Firefox was just gaining traction.

And I agree. Slack is sitting there, consuming over gig of memory on my computer, and Miranda NG was able to do the same functionality with cool skins and just 30 megs of ram.

Skins... Skins... We've lost even those...

[hulitu]

> Boy oh boy, have we forgotten the Maxthon?

Never heard about it (Europe).

[IFC_LLC]

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-2009...

Yes, I've just checked, even in 2009 you still have IE over 64% of browser usage.

[uep]

They said IE was the best browser, not the most popular. I wouldn't dispute that IE was more commonly used at the time.

Just checked your link and this fits with what I thought in terms of marketshare. You can see that Firefox was ~25% of marketshare in 2009. Which is an enormous share of the pie when you consider that they couldn't stick a download link on the front page of the most dominant search engine, and it didn't come preinstalled.

Never used Maxthon.

Damn, this also reminded me that RSS feeds were everywhere back then, and the browser supported it directly.

[IFC_LLC]

Oh don't tell me about Nero, Winamp, eMule, Download managers, auto-dialers, free internet on Saturdays after 2am till 9am, miranda NG, PHPBB, etc.

The internet was awesome.

[nailer]

> They said IE was the best browser, not the most popular.

TBF I should have said 'most popular' for all those categories.