This is complete rubbish. IE was on the cutting edge of web standards, to such an extent it was having to make up some proprietary technologies itself such as XMLHttpRequest (just one example).
The problem is a lot of Ruby/JS/dynamictypedlanguage hipsters these days who shout so loudly about IE having poor standards support weren't actually around at the time. Everyone loved IE back in those days as it was modern and every release had new exciting features in it (both for users and developers).
The fact that IE got some things "wrong" with CSS and had bugs like transparent PNGs not rendering, er, transparently... were just necessary growing pains. This didn't matter in the wild west days of the web as, well, PNGs weren't even that popular back then and CSS was still something web developers were getting to grips with, slowly.
Compare IE4-6 not to later-generation browsers, but to its direct rivals of the day which was Netscape and Opera and not really much else. Compared to these, IE was king.
The problem is a lot of Ruby/JS/dynamictypedlanguage hipsters these days who shout so loudly about IE having poor standards support weren't actually around at the time. Everyone loved IE back in those days as it was modern and every release had new exciting features in it (both for users and developers).
The fact that IE got some things "wrong" with CSS and had bugs like transparent PNGs not rendering, er, transparently... were just necessary growing pains. This didn't matter in the wild west days of the web as, well, PNGs weren't even that popular back then and CSS was still something web developers were getting to grips with, slowly.
Compare IE4-6 not to later-generation browsers, but to its direct rivals of the day which was Netscape and Opera and not really much else. Compared to these, IE was king.