[matwood]

The browser landscape was very different when IE6 was new. In many cases the only way to write a performant, complex web app was to use ActiveX (or Flash). The problem is those apps were never updated as web technologies rapidly moved forward.

[protomyth]

I bet a lot of corporations would have loved for Microsoft to launch a sandboxed version of IE6 that had enough "knobs" for the sysadmins to only allow it to work on an intranet or going to specific sites. Saves a lot of investment, but becomes the new COBOL.