Long before Internet Explorer became the browser everyone loves to hate, it was the driving force of innovation on the Internet. Sometimes it's hard to remember all of the good that Internet Explorer did before Internet Explorer 6 became the scourge of web developers everywhere. Believe it or not, Internet Explorer 4-6 is heavily responsible for web development as we know it today. A number of proprietary features became de facto standards and then official standards with some ending up in the HTML5 specification.
It may be hard to believe that Internet Explorer is actually to thank for a lot of the features that we take for granted today, but a quick walk through history shows that it's true.
It's about time someone showed Internet Explorer some love. On his site, NCZOnline, Nicholas C. Zakas walks us through some of the major contributions to the modern web that we owe to IE.