> IE wasn't difficult because it was behind the times; it was difficult because it was deliberately different. That's not what I recall. As I recall, IE wasn't

> IE wasn't difficult because it was behind the times; it was difficult because it was deliberately different. That's not what I recall. As I recall, IE wasn't difficult just because it was behind the times, or because it was deliberately different; it was difficult because it had lots of bugs and inconsistencies. There were plenty of subtle incantations one had to use to make it behave consistently, and to avoid its worst bugs. We dealt with it because unfortunately MSIE still had lots of users, but once the number of users became low enough, all that bug-avoidance code was dropped by web developers. Adding to that, MSIE's Javascript error messages were extremely cryptic. In my workplace at that time, we made a MSIE-only site (it required an ActiveX control for media streaming) run as much as possible on Mozilla/Firefox (of course the media player didn't work), just to be able to get better Javascript error messages when debugging errors on our Javascript code.