It is nothing remotely like the bad old days. I'm assuming you never had to support IE6.

I did. I remember when NN was big and IE was an afterthought. I remember when IE6 came onto the scene. I remember it all.

It's nothing remotely like the bad old days. You are correct.

It is however bad new days.

I had to and I understand fully well what GP means:

Yes, Chrome is a better browser than IE 6 was, but getting everybody on a team, on every team to test cross browser compability is starting to get hard.

We're now seeing otherwise great developers who more or less openly admit they don't test in other browsers.

I call them out on it. It is unprofessional.

We've fought to get where we was a few years ago, where every modern browser was considered equal.

Don't let any web developer get away with Chrome only!

IE6 was good until it wasn't anymore.

No, IE6 was far less terrible than IE4, but still amazingly awful. If was from the era of browsers where you had to essentially code up different copies of a page per-browser if you wanted any sort of graphical anything.

No you didn't. You had to code exactly one copy: for IE6. Nobody cared about anything else.

Just like nowadays more and more pages only get coded for chrome and might or might not work on Firefox.

Except that IE6 didn't die when IE7 came out - it stuck around. I was working at a company that still had to support IE6 when IE8 was coming out - and firefox was quite popular by that point - we ended up dropping support for it shortly after chrome got popular.

IE6 outlived it's expected lifetime by leaps and bounds due to lots of customers stuck on machines locked into running old version of windows due to financial or corporate policy reasons.

Ever listen to Android web developers? The matrix of versions of Chrome to test if you need to "properly" support Android due to financial or corporate policy reasons is fascinating. It's not as bad today as supporting IE6 and IE11 side-by-side due to idiot corporate policy, but the wind shifts one way or another and it certainly could.

(Fun spitballing doomsday scenarios: LineageOS gets more traction and needs to harder fork; or, Huawei is forced into a hard fork and takes the entire Chinese market with it, which could snowball other markets across; or, some Android worm causes friction with the major carriers and they get back into the version/upgrade micromanagement game even worse than before.)

The scale is massively different though. When you make a page today 95% of it works on all browsers. Back in the IE6 days that wasn't even remotely true, which is why things like jQuery came into existence, not to mention the insane CSS hacks required. IE calculated padding differently to every other browser, requiring you to rewrite any code that used it. There's no equivalent to that today.

Today isn't a dreamland, but it is in no way as bad as the IE6 days.

But that's not the IE6 days. That was when other browsers were already well established and IE6 was that zombie feeding off corporations never upgrading that you just couldn't kill.

But in the early 2000s, you only ever targeted IE6 and maybe 5. Opera was that weird European thing, Netscape disappeared by 2003 and Firefox was that silly open source stuff used by people without friends or any sort of social skills. That was the IE days.

It is, in fact, worse. We didn't have to support mobile platforms back then.