[lifeguard]

You are overlooking the fact that MS is introducing yet another browser variant that web devs have to accommodate. And also the QA dept. And also customer service. And also internal IT.

On second though; Yes, this will be exciting! ;)

[joeybaker]

True, it's another IE version, but an auto-updating, mostly-standards compliant version. IE 10 brings IE into the "modern browser" realm.

[lifeguard]

It doesn't matter how wonderful IE 10 is until over 70% of IE users are upgraded to it. For a period of a few years there will be a flood of IE 10 users because this is what their computer came with. There will still be too many other IE users for commercial websites to ignore. So there will have to be a lot of web code bloat and complexity to accommodate them. I was a professional web developer before IE 1.0 and am speaking from experience.

[anthonyb]

Web development is somewhat different these days. OldIE support is being gradually dropped, primarily due to schedule and/or financial pressure or just web developers being more transparent about costs (eg. "IE6-7 support and testing will be an extra $X, and take an additional two-three weeks")

Most IE6 users that I've spoken to are accustomed to sites looking bad anyway, since most places do only cursory testing on old browsers.

[lifeguard]

At 'dot com' start-ups the matrix effect is a significant factor in engineering time/friction and causes gotchas for the users.

For consulting and enterprise work I agree, it is just "extra $X".