People had/have more than one reason for disliking it. One was that they were forcing their proprietary webbrowser product deeply into the OS for no reason other than to disadvantage any possible competition. If IE had been open, people could have competed by modifying and extending IE.
>If IE had been open, people could have competed by modifying and extending IE.
But who would have been ready to put in $100M in ~1995 on a browser besides Microsoft? Remember there was no money to make in the market. Whats interesting is MS actually made an offer to Netscape to bundle their browser with the OS before they started work on IE. Netscape was barely surviving by selling server software. Not to mention that they too broke standards much like IE - adding several non-standard CSS elements, tags, proprietary DOM, etc. Ofcource some of these Netscape specific tags later got introduced into the official spec, but they weren't at the time.
If you look at webkit which recently got forked - without Apple and Google, Webkit would immediately die. No amount of volunteers or the fact that it was open source would be able to keep it alive while being a realistic competitor to other browsers. New operating systems, new Web standards, new JS engine improvements would all pose immense challenges that require an organized commercial effort to tackle.
