zlacker

Microsoft exposed virtually all elements in the DOM. Netscape was extremely limited in this regard.

>>fullst+(OP)
They also definitely advanced the CSS more than Netscape.

modern DOM, Ajax, modern CSS, bunch of other small details of JS, all iirc came from IE.

>>p_l+u
Development between IE4 and 5.5 was massive.

>>scotty+R2
You and the grandparents are thinking of a slightly earlier time. Yes IE jumped over Netscape massively in technical terms. Then Netscape died an MS, having mission accomplished, basically stopped touching the browser.

>>paol+p5
The problem wasn’t per se that MS stopped (having a stable platform that doesn’t change continuously is in principle a good thing), it was most of all the many quirks, inconsistencies and bugs that IE had.

>>layer8+Sj
Even among browsers with the same version numbers! I recall array.push or array.pop missing on some Windows PCs with identical IE6 versions. It had to do with the upgrade path that the PC took.