I think it's cute but it's hard to get over the sense that it's the moral equivalent of "This site best viewed with frames at 1024x768 screen resolution with Netscape Navigator 2.0."
I think asking the user to use tech that is less than 5 years old is more reasonable then specifying 1 version and resolution. And in those days there barely was a browser that was over 5 years old.
now that the world has moved on from the two-browser days, and we actually have some standards in place, there's a huge difference between "only this idiosyncratic browser" and "anything but this noncompliant browser".
So then just design and test with the compliant browsers and let IE users figure it out for themselves. If just a fraction of the sites had done that back during the browser wars then IE would have become a compliant browser.
not really - during the browser wars, ie had such a large share of the market that if you didn't support it, your site was considered broken, not the browser.
I think it shows that "Works best with X" can easily turn into "Works best with Y" and nobody is better at that game than Microsoft. Almost nobody can stay in business once Microsoft decides to destroy you by bundling a copycat product for free with their monopoly OS. But still it was shortsighted of Netscape to:
a) Try to get the web hooked on nonstandard behavior such as lenient parsing.