[nirvdrum]

I think your history is a little skewed. When IE6 came out, it was an awesome browser for the time. It was light years better than anything else out there and yes, it embraced/extended HTML & CSS, but really, no other browser out there supported the specs either. They were the de facto standard so it wasn't even a problem.

The reason IE 6 is such a problem is Microsoft didn't do anything with IE for years after that while the world evolved. But I'm really not convinced the Web would be anywhere near what we see today if Netscape just kept pumping out increasingly bad browsers.

[masklinn]

> I think your history is a little skewed. When IE6 came out, it was an awesome browser for the time. It was light years better than anything else out there

No, because it had been preceded/preempted by IE5/Mac, which had feature IE6 never got (such as full support for PNGs including gamma correction).

[huggyface]

When IE6 came out, it was an awesome browser for the time.

IE 4.0 was an awesome browser for the time. In fact it was such an awesome browser, and had so little friction to use, that it largely killed the browser market.

IE 5.0 and 6.0 were minimal effort, piecemeal, close to zero improvement iterations.

Microsoft deserves every bit of disdain that they get. Even still if there are ever movements afoot to try to move the web forward, Microsoft will always resist. People can herald IE 10 for finally incorporating a lot of long overdue functionality, but Microsoft does it only because they have little choice beyond abandoning the market.

Windows Phone 7 demonstrates Microsoft's commitment to the web -- the browser is relative junk. It is quite literally years behind competitors.