[CoffeeDregs]

For me the point is less about: IE is no longer that bad. It's true that IE9 and IE10 are much better and supporting IE is no longer a 2x web-dev penalty, but that's not the point.

The point is: when the vampire is exhibiting weakness you drive a stake through its heart. The vampire turned a bunch of your fellow townspeople into vampires; saying the bite is no longer so bad doesn't mean that the vampire is now to be respected.

It's also not about punishing Microsoft. [Sure, the warm glow of schadenfreude feels nice.] It is about demonstrating to the tech community the long term costs of SHITTING IN OUR SANDBOX. Those of us who were developing web sites during the IE6 days want to show Google, Facebook, Apple, Zynga, Adobe, etc what happens when you Embrace and Extend web standards.

You don't know frustration until you get your website all sorted in FF 2, then open up IE 6 only to see a completely jacked website, only to realize you basically have no web development tools for IE 6 and you'll be spending the next 2 days blibdly fiddling with margins, padding, how-to-force-zoom, etc.

[ricardobeat]

There were (bad) dev tools for IE6. Fact is, after a few months you'd know exactly what could go wrong, and fix everything in a day. Still extra work, but not that terrible. Sometimes I miss playing that game :)

[robertpateii]

So you're saying that it's not about punishing the criminals, that it's about deterring people from becoming criminals.

It's arguable if that kind of policy is effective.

Also, it comes across like folks actually are still mad about it.

[ethermal]

So why would you sort it in FF then open IE why wouldn't you start with IE then go to FF. I really think you are starting in the wrong spot.

[CoffeeDregs]

The tooling around FF was/is remarkably better than that with IE, so I always found it easier to start there head to IE than to start by groping blindly in IE.