The MS AJAX control toolkit and UpdatePanel probably didn&#x27;t help, either.<p>I think I can probably say that Javascript engines are an order of magnitude faster than they were 16 (!) years ago.<p>If I may make a generalisation, C#&#x2F;Java devs are more likely to be &quot;enterprise&quot; developers and said enterprises were more likely to be the ones on IE &lt;11. I know I fought damn hard to upgrade from IE8 just a couple of years ago. My webdev skills suffered as a consequence, too.<p>Microsoft moved pretty fast once they realised that IE needed to compete again - and Visual Studio evolved alongside it (mostly).<p>VS2015 is now a pretty good development environment for Javascript&#x2F;Typescript and even includes some Grunt build support (although I haven&#x27;t had a play with it yet).