[CamperBob]

So you think it's a good idea for Microsoft to continually break crappy internal web applications that misuse outdated Microsoft technologies?

Yes. If corporate IT departments get burned enough, they'll stop basing their in-house applications on proprietary standards that come and go like boy bands. That might not be good for Microsoft but they certainly don't want to be the only vendor offering lock-in as a "feature," do they?

If upgrading a browser breaks an application you wrote, chances are 99.999% that it's your fault, and nobody else's. Either you have a bug, or you chose the wrong tool for the job in the first place.

[CWuestefeld]

they'll stop basing their in-house applications on proprietary standards

At the time, IE6 was more standards-compliant than any other browser. The problem here isn't that it was a bad browser, it's because the standards refuse to sit in one place.

[CamperBob]

Point being, though, the "standards" that are causing trouble today were proprietary to Microsoft (ActiveX, for example).

I shouldn't have used the term "proprietary standards" at all -- it's a bit of an oxymoron.