It shares a fraction of one property with IE6. It's nothing like IE6 in all other respects. A quick refresher for those that perhaps was not around in those he

It shares a fraction of one property with IE6. It's nothing like IE6 in all other respects. A quick refresher for those that perhaps was not around in those heady days: to build even moderately advanced (dynamic) web pages that were cross browser compatible was not merely a question of remembering to test in both, it was a significant engineering commitment. To add to the badness, Netscape in those years was frankly just not a very good browser, so it was not a particularly easy sell. Thus a lot of apps built in those years only (and quite rationally, too) targeted IE4, 5 and finally 6, Microsoft being very focused on backwards compatibility. IE7 was the first browser standards compliant enough to make cross browser development reasonably easy, also being the first browser in the line to have to compete with Firefox. It broke backwards compatibility, which is why IE6 ended up hanging around for so long and being so hated, even if was the DHTML API of IE4 that was the original culprit. Today, there is no good excuse to build web apps that does not work in all the major browsers, it's just so (relatively) easy. But that was emphatically not the case 15-20 years ago.