"crashes and lockups happen often and consistently enough to prove it's a lousy product."
I have never crashed IE. Never. I am a software engineer and have created some significant web applications, and I have never crashed IE. In fact, dealing with all the limitations of the other browsers has been my biggest headache.
All that means is you are a good software engineer. Bully for you.
But you can't seriously claim the same for the many many other wanna-be programmers, flash authors, ad merchants and associated hacks out there who are also writing code and content to be run and displayed on IE.
And browser "limitations" are no measure of software stability. You simply can't claim (unless you're a Microsoft marketing troll - which I doubt) that a site which runs perfectly and stably under Firefox, but crashes explorer, is exactly evidence of the "high level of stability" of explorer. The stability of a browser is not tested by well designed websites, but by bad ones. And it's been my considerable experience that bad websites at worst merely display incorrectly under Firefox, but the browser keeps running. In explorer, they display correctly but crash (often locking up the whole machine). With explorer, there's simply no soft failure mode; it's either crash or nothing.
"I am a software engineer and have created some significant web applications, and I have never crashed IE. In fact, dealing with all the limitations of the other browsers has been my biggest headache."
BTTT