Chrome was released in 2008. It didn’t take a market share right away. While a browser wasn’t as big a part of daily life for a lot of people it was still a big part for a lot of people even outside of work.
On the other hand Windows had a much bigger market share for most of the time IE was the leading browser. It not being cross platform wasn’t terribly relevant.
IE had a stranglehold on the internet. Even after chrome took over there were still a lot of sites that were only optimized/usable on IE. It is easily guilty of pretty much everything that is a modern complaint about chrome. You just didn’t use it on a phone, but you also didn’t have a handful of apps in place of a browser for various web sites/services.
Chrome was released in 2008. It didn’t take a market share right away. While a browser wasn’t as big a part of daily life for a lot of people it was still a big part for a lot of people even outside of work.
On the other hand Windows had a much bigger market share for most of the time IE was the leading browser. It not being cross platform wasn’t terribly relevant.
IE had a stranglehold on the internet. Even after chrome took over there were still a lot of sites that were only optimized/usable on IE. It is easily guilty of pretty much everything that is a modern complaint about chrome. You just didn’t use it on a phone, but you also didn’t have a handful of apps in place of a browser for various web sites/services.