I'm really glad this method of execution was an honest banner. (The biggest problem here might've been cutting colleagues out of the loop it sounds like they were probably supposed to be in.)

When I started reading the story, I was afraid it was going to go in the direction of sneaky sabotage, like intentionally causing performance problems or crashes. There've been accusations of that happening, within the last year. Earlier, there was a long history in the computer industry of sneaky sabotage of competitors, which was suggested by the (perhaps only a joke, in that particular case) mantra "DOS isn't done, till Lotus doesn't run".

You don't need sneaky sabotage to break the UX in IE6. Just not going out of your way for it will do that.

I remember. :) Getting browser developers to comply with basic standards was a bigger problem around then. (Initially, everyone out of the gate, including MCom/Netscape, was rushing to throw in new features without standards, either to make the Web more appealing to people, or because the nonstandard bits were a shorter path from their current platforms or implementations, or as a competitive play to be the preferred browser. A bit after, one of the developers had incentive to sabotage the Web, which arguably is part of the reason why many organizations got stuck on particular old browser versions.) After monumental amounts of work, everyone started accepting standards, we then had waves of other related problems, and might be entering a new wave now (unclear).

zoom:1;float:left

> When I started reading the story, I was afraid it was going to go in the direction of sneaky sabotage, like intentionally causing performance problems or crashes.

You mean like they seem to be doing to Firefox right now?

>I can think of a third reason: everybody in the industry wanted IE6 dead.

Ever heard the story of Ken McElroy? He was a rapist, burglar and child molester murdered in 1981 in Missouri.

In front of 46 witnesses. Nobody saw anything.