Comment by mrguyorama

This was like 2004. Chrome, Safari, and Firefox all had getElementById in their first versions in like 2003, Opera had it in version 7, Internet Explorer was the odd one out.

This was IE6 days, the real bad old days. Remember that we were still mostly constrained to XMLHTTPRequests for calls to APIs

Anything actually important to be done in a web browser didn't use javascript, it used an ActiveX Component/extension, a java applet, or Flash or Shockwave (by Macromedia at the time!)