Most popular only because it was included with the OS and most IT departments did not allow use of other browsers. Just because it was the most installed does not make it the most popular. There was an old saying, "Internet Explorer: the most used browser to download another browser."
IE 4 and 5 were pretty good. ActiveDesktop was pretty cool. XMLHttpRequest turned out to be revolutionary.
It was only after triple whammy of Netscape being unable to further compete, the dotcom crash and the antitrust suit against Microsoft's integration between Windows and IE that IE got deprioritized by MS and slowly turned into the underfeatured mess every developer hated.
This take is pretty revisionist. IE4 wasn't good, ActiveDesktop and ActiveX were either useless or actually bad. AJAX was probably the only good thing out of IE, and I would not dare to call it an happy accident but I'm tempted
Although Netscape was even worse (if you resized the window, it reloaded the whole page), and IE for Mac at the time had the best CSS support out of any browser (it was a different renderer from IE Win). I did a lot of bouncing between browsers (Netscape/IE/iCab/Opera) back then until Mozilla came out and wiped everything else out.
That was a saying later in the game and among techies. Website usage stats indicate that in 2007 a solid 67% of people were using IE, and that didn't drop below a majority of usage until mid-2010.
I remember hearing stats about the continued high numbers for IE, but a lot of those numbers were attributed to pirated copies of XP being used in China. Maybe it was why IE6 seemed to hang around as high as it was. Just a clarification of the numbers that I found interesting.
A quarter of Chinese web surfers were using Internet Explorer 6 twelve years after it was released. At that time, most online banking in China only supported Internet Explorer and derivatives.
It's not a like it's a vote. Most people didn't choose it. They had it because their corp uses Windows, and Windows came with IE, and IT did not allow other browsers.
You're being a revisionist. The claim that it wasn't popular is just dumb. For years it was simply superior to all other browsers (both technologically and users liking it).
