Dude, IE was Windows-only. It went against everything the open Internet standards advocated for. And on top of it, I was a Mac guy, and Mac IE was a completely

Dude, IE was Windows-only. It went against everything the open Internet standards advocated for. And on top of it, I was a Mac guy, and Mac IE was a completely different beast, so I had to code for Windows IE, Mac IE, then Safari and Firefox and eventually early Chrome. And Windows IE was always the motherfucker who you had to figure out these nasty CSS and JS hacks for to get, forget pixel-perfect, how about pixel-similar rendering vs. other browsers. If you wanted pixel-perfect it was a fucking nightmare. Literally doubled your work time just to add WinIE compatibility. This was in the IE5/6/7 era. Speaking of JS... all this was made worse because there were NO good JS libraries at the time to make things easier. Debugging consisted of alerts. Eventually, Prototype (and later Jquery) were literally godsends, and there was some JS lib (forgot the name) which added a reasonable debugger (this was before browsers themselves had reasonably good integrated debuggers!) Chrome is not like that. The same rendering engine exists on Linux, Windows and Mac, and it has an open-source highly-compatible version, Chromium.