Back when IE6 was released, ten years ago (!!), it was really starting to look like Microsoft had won the browser war. Browsing the web with anything other than IE on a Windows machine was an increasingly crippling experience.
It was a very grim time.
Fortunately, a number of web developers held out of a viable alternative to a Win32/IE monopoly. When Firefox was finally good enough for general use it was embraced by many web developers, Google in particular. By 2005 many prominent new web sites (Gmail and Google Reader, for two) took special care to support Firefox from day 1, something that was would have been unheard-of only a few years earlier. At that point it was clear that Microsoft could not win the browser war, and IE development languished.
It was a very grim time.
Fortunately, a number of web developers held out of a viable alternative to a Win32/IE monopoly. When Firefox was finally good enough for general use it was embraced by many web developers, Google in particular. By 2005 many prominent new web sites (Gmail and Google Reader, for two) took special care to support Firefox from day 1, something that was would have been unheard-of only a few years earlier. At that point it was clear that Microsoft could not win the browser war, and IE development languished.