This is the problem when looking back on the past; you miss the context. IE6, at the time in 2001, was the fastest most stable browser out there. It was magnitudes better than Netscape Navigator, which was bloated and far more crash happy. IE6 wasn't always terrible; it was just terrible compared what came after -- which is exactly how things should work.
For web apps, IE6 and anything that came before was always terrible. It used to be hard to build a decent web app, even if most of your code ran on the server. There is a huge qualitative difference between building for an ad-hoc platform and one that is rigorously built and tested against some externally defined standard.
Sure, Chrome may be lagging in some areas, but--like all modern browsers--the platform it provides conforms rigorously to the standards it supports. And that makes all the difference.
I think the desire to create this insane things using technology that wasn't ready for it is what drove browser development forward. But this is like complaining your toddler couldn't do algebra now that all your kids are teenagers.
I actually wrote an abstraction layer that normalized it a bit. Not nearly as cleanly as the DOM API eventually did, but enough to get work done (for the most part). Still had to do things like have a white overlay set/unset on the screen for NN to avoid visual flickering, etc.
document.all, the way IE worked had a few advantages... Layers in NN didn't allow you to break apart a form into child components you could hide/show was a particular issue. So you had to mirror values in/out of the child layer portions of the form. That was about the most common and painful problem between the two imho.
Another was when IE 5.0.0 broke the older API for dealing with changing the children of a <select> node. Which was fixed in 5.0.1, but 5.0.0 was on every Office 2000 and Windows 2000 Disc, and what a LOT of people had. That was painful to deal with too.
> IE5.5 was the first browser you could reliably write "rich" web UIs in
My point is that in the IE6 era (and previously), doing so was categorically hard -- I didn't say impossible. Also, that changed with FF 3.5, IE8, Chrome, etc.
Admittedly, IE6 and FF 1.5 were the first browsers I had to develop apps for from scratch. (And FF was already far more robust.)
Even if you consider the context and era, Chrome is still magnitudes better than IE because the real problem with IE6 was that it was hard to upgrade. It didn't matter that IE6 was fast at some point because IE didn't auto-update and Microsoft often tied IE to Windows upgrades, which in turn were often tied to new computer purchases or long enterprise contracts. Not to mention IE's significant divergence from standards meant it was hard to coordinate feature support. Chrome, in comparison, is easy to update and conforms to standards.
IE was not tied to Windows upgrades, except in a sense that new IE versions would eventually stop supporting old Windows versions (but that's true of all browsers). IE6 was available on Win98+ and NT4+, for example. IE7 and IE8 were XP/2003+.
As far as divergence from the standards, again, that was generally not the case when IE6 shipped - if anything, it was at the bleeding edge, and past it in some ways. The real problem with it was that it wasn't updated fast enough to keep up with the rapid pace of web standards after the initial release; and when IE7 finally came, it had very minor improvements (IIRC the biggest one was PNG transparency?). But that was a different era already.
Actually it was tied to Windows upgrades. It available for older versions of Windows but it was developed as part of development of new version of Windows!
MS IE 1 was developed for Windows 95 Plus!, MS IE 2 for Windows NT 4.0, MS IE 3 was for Windows 95 OSR2 (essentially new OS, it even included it's own brand-new filesystem!), MS IE 4 was for Windows98 (but was rushed with Windows 95 OSR 2.5), MS IE 5.0 was for Windows 2000 (but was included as part of Windows 98 SE), MS IE 5.5 for was Windows ME (which wasn't initially planned - that's why it got 5.5 number, not 6), MS IE 6 was for Windows XP, MS IE 7 was for Windows Vista (and since Vista was horribly delayed so was MS IE 7) and MS IE 8 was for Window 7!
The first version of MS IE which wasn't developed as part of Windows development was actually MS IE 9.
I don't know if it was developed as part of the development of a new version of Windows or, far more likely, it was simply released with each new version of Windows for maximum impact.
IE2 was the first version available for Windows 3.1, Mac OS, etc. Sure it was released at the same time as NT 4.0 but I don't think it was developed with it.
The big exception is IE4.0 which was deeply integrated with the Windows 98 shell (hello Active Desktop).
But in the context and era, auto-updates were not common. No other browser auto-updated. Windows XP was released a month before IE6. Windows Update was still considered a revolutionary thing (and had been a stand-alone product only a short time earlier).
Considering the context and era, IE being updated through Windows Updates was actually a huge improvement over the state of the art at the time.
