From Mildly Annoying to Criminally Negligent: Every IE Version Ranked by Developer Suffering

Let's be honest: lumping all Internet Explorer versions together as a single villain is like blaming every Nickelback album equally for the suffering of the early 2000s. Some were worse than others. Some were much worse. And a couple — brace yourself — were actually kind of fine.

We've spent an embarrassing amount of time reconstructing the psychological damage inflicted by each major IE release, consulting ancient Stack Overflow threads, the ghost of Quirks Mode documentation, and the suppressed memories of developers who survived the browser wars. Here, in definitive order from "survivable" to "genuinely traumatic," is the Internet Explorer Version Tier List.

S-Tier: The Ones That Actually Tried (Briefly)

IE 11 — The Deathbed Apology

IE 11 was Microsoft's version of showing up to your own intervention with a fruit basket. Was it good? No. Was it meaningfully better? Genuinely, yes. It shipped with real developer tools, improved JavaScript performance, and a CSS engine that only made you cry on Tuesdays instead of every day. It supported Flexbox — sort of. It understood what a promise was — kind of. It was the browser equivalent of a reformed villain who still occasionally kicks a dog.

CSS Support: C+ JS Performance: B- Developer Sanity Loss: Moderate. You'd still lose a weekend to a float bug, but at least you could inspect the float bug.

IE 9 — The Glow-Up Nobody Appreciated

IE 9 arrived in 2011 like a student who finally did the reading. It introduced hardware acceleration, actual HTML5 support, and a JavaScript engine (Chakra) that didn't make Chrome developers laugh out loud. The problem? By the time IE 9 showed up, developers had already emotionally moved on. Firefox had been their rebound. Chrome had become their main character. IE 9 was technically competent and entirely too late.

CSS Support: B JS Performance: B Developer Sanity Loss: Low-to-moderate. Most damage was emotional, not technical.

A-Tier: Annoying but Survivable

IE 10 — The Almost-There

IE 10 is the browser version of a job candidate who's 90% qualified. It added CSS3 transitions, better Flexbox prefixes, and improved standards compliance. It also came pre-installed on Windows 8, which meant it inherited the Windows 8 energy: technically functional, deeply confusing, and beloved by approximately nobody. Still, it mostly worked. Developers who lived through IE 6 considered IE 10 a vacation.

CSS Support: B+ JS Performance: B Developer Sanity Loss: Mild. Mostly papercuts.

B-Tier: Historically Significant, Actively Unpleasant

IE 7 — The Overcorrection

After IE 6's years of dominance, Microsoft released IE 7 in 2006 as a security and standards patch. It fixed the PNG transparency bug. It introduced tabbed browsing. It also introduced a whole new set of layout regressions that broke things that had previously worked fine in IE 6, creating the legendary situation where developers had to write separate CSS hacks for each version. IE 7 didn't just cause new bugs — it invalidated your existing workarounds. Respect the hustle, hate the browser.

CSS Support: D+ JS Performance: D Developer Sanity Loss: High. Not for what it broke, but for what it un-fixed.

IE 8 — The Last Gasp of Dignity

IE 8 gave us IE Developer Tools that were almost usable. It introduced document modes, which was either a brilliant backward-compatibility solution or a nightmare wrapped in a dropdown menu, depending on your disposition. It was the last version that a significant portion of enterprise users would cling to well into the 2010s, making it technically obsolete but professionally inescapable for years. IE 8 is the browser equivalent of a coworker who retired but keeps coming back to use the printer.

CSS Support: D JS Performance: D+ Developer Sanity Loss: Sustained and chronic.

C-Tier: Pre-Modern, Pre-Accountability

IE 5.5 and IE 5.0 — The Architects of the Box Model Crime

These two versions gave us the infamous IE box model, where width included padding and borders, directly contradicting the CSS specification. This single decision — whether intentional or catastrophic oversight — caused more developer hours of confusion than any other browser quirk in history. To be fair, some developers now argue the IE box model was actually more intuitive, which is the browser equivalent of Stockholm syndrome. box-sizing: border-box exists today because of these two browsers. We owe them our worst habits and our best workarounds.

CSS Support: F (but confidently) JS Performance: F Developer Sanity Loss: Generational.

IE 4 — The Ambitious Disaster

IE 4 introduced Dynamic HTML, which Microsoft implemented in its own proprietary way that bore little resemblance to what anyone else was doing. It was the browser that taught a generation of developers that "supports JavaScript" and "supports your JavaScript" are very different statements. Chaotic, ambitious, and largely forgotten, IE 4 is the browser equivalent of a startup that pivoted six times and still ran out of runway.

CSS Support: F JS Performance: F Developer Sanity Loss: Moderate. You didn't know enough yet to fully understand what was happening to you.

D-Tier: The Origin Story

IE 3 — The One That Started It All

IE 3 shipped in 1996 with partial CSS support, which was actually more than Netscape 3 offered at the time. This is the browser that started the browser wars, that shipped with Windows 95, and that introduced a generation of users to the concept of the internet as a thing that loaded slowly and sometimes worked. IE 3 is responsible for everything that followed. In that sense, it is either the original sin or the big bang, depending on your theology.

CSS Support: F (but first) JS Performance: F (but first) Developer Sanity Loss: Zero. Nobody had expectations yet. It was beautiful.

The Undisputed Final Boss: IE 6

You knew this was coming.

IE 6 launched in 2001 and spent the next decade as the most used, most hated, and most consequential browser in the history of web development. It had a near-monopoly on the market. It stopped receiving updates for years. Its box model was wrong. Its PNG support was catastrophically broken. Its position: relative behavior was interpretive fiction. Its float clearing required rituals. The double margin bug. The peekaboo bug. The 3-pixel jog bug. The disappearing content bug.

And yet — every CSS hack you know, every reset stylesheet, every defensive coding pattern, every comment in a stylesheet that says /* IE6 fix */ — all of it traces back to IE 6. It broke us. It made us better. We will never forgive it.

CSS Support: F- JS Performance: F- Developer Sanity Loss: Catastrophic. Permanent. Career-defining.

Final Verdict

If the Internet Explorer version lineup were a family, IE 6 would be the one everyone avoids at Thanksgiving, IE 11 would be the one who finally went to therapy, and IE 7 would be the one who fixed one thing and broke three others and still expects a thank-you card.

Argue with us in the comments. We know you will. We're counting on it.