4 ms·

The big difference is that IE6 was a PITA to develop against while Chrome is a breeze. Developers wouldn't have hated the IE6 monoculture if it was as fast as C

• resoluteteeth 7y ago
  I think you are looking at the later stage of IE's life when it was already dominant. When IE first caught on it was extremely fast and pleasant to use compared to Netscape (also netscape wasn't originally free). If you only cared about IE it was actually a complete breeze to develop for using proprietary stuff like ActiveX (ignoring the fact that ActiveX was a bad idea for various reasons). Lots of websites started showing banners saying that they were optimized IE, because people were primary targeting IE when they made new websites, in part because it was such a breeze to develop for. IE had lots of HTML/javascript features that made things much easier than other browsers at the time. It's important to realize that IE only became difficult to deal with once 1) Microsoft essentially stopped trying to improve it after they won all the market share and 2) people needed to make web pages that worked on other browsers. At this point people wanted to use newer features that IE didn't support, but needing to support IE 6 necessitated either abandoning more modern features or using all sorts of hacks/polyfills to work around IE's quirks.