"Standards compliant" is a bit of revisionists history. Mid 90s were wild west of browser development. Netscape and later MS were releasing browser every 6-12 m

"Standards compliant" is a bit of revisionists history. Mid 90s were wild west of browser development. Netscape and later MS were releasing browser every 6-12 months (fast for the time). Standards were defined post-hoc. JS, CSS, ActiveX, Applets were all created along-side or before standards. MS practices were mostly ruthless and some illegal, but as a product it was in later times similar to or little better than Navigator.