The defining characteristics of IE in the dark ages were that 1) it was ubiquitous 2) web sites developed to it and, instead of fixing sites in other browsers,

The defining characteristics of IE in the dark ages were that 1) it was ubiquitous 2) web sites developed to it and, instead of fixing sites in other browsers, they recommended its use over other browsers. You often couldn’t even log into your $WHATEVER from Mozilla on Linux, for example. The modern analog to that is certainly not Safari.