Nope it was pretty great actually, then Microsoft thought they had won the war.

Initially, IE6 was much better than the competition. But it was still buggy, and had some very weird rendering behavior. Over time, other browsers became much less buggy, but IE6 was still around. That's how IE6 came to be viewed, in retrospect, as a very buggy browser.

Should we have a look at Chrome's bug database?

Chrome was the first browser to adopt an evergreen model, where updates were installed automatically. While Chrome (and Firefox, once they adopted this model) have had many bugs over the years, when they fix a bug everyone gets the fix. The problem with IE6 (and later, up until Edge) was that bugs were here permanently: something that web developers needed to work around for as long as anyone was still using that browser.

Should we go through all open tickets that are open since 2013? Or start even earlier with the "forced closed" ones?

IE6 had major compatibility bugs that were never going to be fixed. For example:

* It considered width to include border and padding, when the spec and other browsers did not: https://www.jefftk.com/p/the-revenge-of-the-ie-box-model

* Floated block elements would get their margins doubled, so people would typically use padding instead.

* Its implementation of height was more like min-height.

While I'm sure Firefox and Chrome have open bugs that are older than that, I'd expect them to be much less important than these critical misinterpretations of CSS.

Well, I can track down examples of similar critical bugs for Chrome, but then again, I guess it would just move the goal posts to another defence round for Chrome.

You think Chrome, Firefox, Edge, or Safari (the main evergreen browsers) have bugs that have been open for years and are as critical as considering an element's width to include its border and padding? This misinterpretation of the CSS specification was something that essentially all front-end developers had to work around for 10+ years!

Yes I think so, all of them have bugs that web developers have to work around, again should we look at Chrome's bug database or maybe AdWords has a better source of information for such workarounds?

If you want to point to an example bug, I think that would help me understand your point, yes.

(To give a sense a sense of the scale I think we're talking about, this would be a bug that, say, more than half of web developers have to understand and work around in a typical month)

My point it that you are tainted by your employer, so this discussion is worthless, no matter what I come up with.

Whereas Chrome makes life miserable for users not using Chrome, because of the sheer amount of non-standard, Chrome-only features used in current webdev.

Which non-standard features?

Using google properties is a bit of an easy jab, but:

Youtube using polymer/shadowdomv0 and absolutely destroying performance on Firefox is a an easy example. Google Earth used non-standard APIs.

Otherwise, have a quick search for "non-standard" on MDN, and see how many of those Chrome implements.

But both of those are Google products. Yet here we are in a thread blaming an entire generation of web creators and users.

Ah, so only when Microsoft does it is bad, but when that generation worships Google for doing the same it is suddenly alright.