IE had better CSS support than anything else up until they froze IE6 and eventually Firefox (Chimera!) caught up and surpassed it. The hatred of IE came because

IE had better CSS support than anything else up until they froze IE6 and eventually Firefox (Chimera!) caught up and surpassed it. The hatred of IE came because it was frozen and non-standard and full of bugs. It wasn’t that the default box model was ever good, it was just that it was the spec, and there was a big push to follow the spec instead of blindly copying bugs from other browsers. At that time, we also thought XHTML was a good idea, but eventually experience taught us how to balance the spec with practicality.