I hate Internet Explorer. I say that present-tense as its zombie-corpse still haunts the internet, holding back front-end web development. It's not a surprise nor even controversial. It's quite banal, so much so that my contrarian tendency makes me want to point out that IE was better than Netscape, (which it was). Even then with it certainly was not better than the many browsers after it.

I used anything I could in the early days of Mac OS X to get away from IE 5.5: Mozilla Suite, Omniweb, Phoenix (later to become FireBird and finally FireFox), Chimera (Later renamed to Camino, a wonderful Cocoa/Objective-C port of FireFox).

My ire for IE grew as I progressed a developer, there were those painful moments when a simple console.log would stop IE from executing a javascript file dead in its tracks, or creating conditionals like [if lte IE 7]. Internet Explorer often would take a design I slaved over in Safari and FireFox only to see a :last-child pseudo selector not work, and wonder why selectivizr.js wasn't working. So many polyfills and hacks...

Edge was a different beast. Trident was revamped and renamed as EdgeHTML. It was fitting, rendering engine was modern (at least from a MS perspective). Things... worked. My opinion was suddenly, a nice lukewarm "It doesn't suck". I never thought I'd be sad to see Microsoft go.

So I ended up writing up a post fitting for Internet Explorer and Edge, titled: How Microsoft lost the Browser Wars, the long form article style I prefer. It covers the a brief history of the browser wars and my personal take on how IE faltered and Edge failed.