IE also had a custom image filtering scripting language embedded in CSS that was pretty dangerous, you could easily hang someone's whole computer if you weren't

IE also had a custom image filtering scripting language embedded in CSS that was pretty dangerous, you could easily hang someone's whole computer if you weren't careful. A common hack to find was adding png transparency which IE infamously lacked, at great computational cost to the user (this was at a time where the lack of other CSS features made PNG transparency quite necessary for building fancy UIs). It's worth pointing out that many of the old ugly things were IE specific including the feature referenced by the parent comment... it was a time when "standard" had little weight, although some of the good ideas like box-sizing were adopted by W3C.