[saurik]

... and before IE it was Netscape: people didn't like that either, but you (and most people who talk about browser history) seem to forget or ignore that :(. If you go back and read through the W3C mailing lists people really really hated Netscape (the by-far dominant web browser at the time, for which books on HTML would have sections dedicated to optimizing for and would even go as far as to say being Netscape-only was fine) for seemingly making up HTML as they went along (almost all of the stuff in HTML that is deprecated, including all of the markup that was for style and presentation only, were Netscape-only HTML extensions) and refusing to take up the charge of CSS. Microsoft was even occasionally described as the potential savior that would come in with a second implementation that paid attention to them (and in fact you then find a ton of praise on the list from Microsoft publishing open DTDs from IE).

Despite all of this, Netscape (a company whose business model at the time relied on selling web browsers and getting contracts with ISPs to bundle their software with subscriptions) managed to get Microsoft's hands slapped so hard by the justice department for having the gall to give away a web browser as part of an operating system (something we now all take for granted: no one complains that Apple pushes Safari with OS X, nor do nearly enough people scream loudly about the fact that alternative web browsers on iOS are only possible if you use Apple's rendering engine in a crippled mode, defeating the purpose, despite Apple having near-monopoly status on the mobile web) that Microsoft never quite got back the courage to keep moving forward given the new constraints they were under. Thankfully, in the process, Netscape still died, and from its ashes arose the idea that an open-source web browser would be interesting and viable, leading to the ecosystem we have today.

[yuhong]

Well, to be honest, why did Opera once had ads?

And on Netscape and CSS: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2108940