Earlier quoted context omitted.
>IE was absolutely hated for not evolving. I'm curious what "its own vision" was, other than "do as little as possible, while Mozilla and Opera keeps pushing forward." IE6 was the best for a long time, also it had VML which it kept in place and didn't move on SVG for a looooonnnnnngggg time, because of course VML was integrated in office products as the vector markup format and probably because it was made in MS. So…
IE6 had a lot of bugs (not different vision of standards, but bugs). A kind of bugs that looked like developers were lazy to cover all possible cases. As an example, take "double margin bug" [1]. It cannot be explained by alternative standards. I remember there were more bugs of this type, but can't google them quickly. [1] https://css-tricks.com/ie-css-bugs-thatll-get-you-every-time...
So again on its initial release, IE6 was the best browser. Did it have bugs? You bet! Were those bugs as irritating as the ones in Netscape - well the XSL-T that was generating html for a site once put a p inside of an li and Netscape would blue screen my Windows machine 75% of the time when that happened, unfortunately it turns out you cannot do a quick CSS hack for that.