[bruce511]

>> There's a huge gap between ie6 and what's happening now.

Yes. The fast paced development, and rich environment we see now is sooooo much better than the stagnation of IE6.

Cutting funding essentially returns us to the IE6 monoculture with no progress.

I, for one, am not advocating a return.

[asadotzler]

IE 6 gave us web apps with XMLHttpReques. IE 6 was amazing and developers loved it. It kicked the pants off of Netscape and earlier IEs.

[bruce511]

Yes, it added a lot of new things snd gained 100% market share. Then did absolutely nothing for years and years.

The web basically stagnated because once you have 100% there's no incentive to even fix bugs.

[viraptor]

> Cutting funding essentially returns us to the IE6 monoculture with no progress.

1. It doesn't return us to monoculture - Monoculture of ie6 gave us multiple browsers, which recently all merged into Chrome. We already have a monoculture which will now lose funding.

2. We're not losing any of that progress. Actual documented standards exist now, all players implement the same basics, and you can create most websites without browser specific quirks. That's not going away.

3. We've had so much progress that Electron is its own massive OS now. We could do with a bit less progress and a bit more "how do we make this mess maintainable".