> What other browser released at the same time as IE6 would work well (or at all) with them modern web?

Not relevant, the problem is that IE6 didn't work with the web back then unless untold amounts of time was wasted and untold amounts of pain experienced to get it to work. When Microsoft got the market leadership they just stopped every investment in it until forced to get back in the game, and GP fears the same will happen again if they're allowed to gain dominant position again.

> Not relevant, the problem is that IE6 didn't work with the web back then

I think you're mis-remembering a little. Or maybe you had a different job than I did.

Back then, the web WAS IE6. There was nothing else. And it really was, for a time, a popularly-praised relief from the previous browser wars. I didn't have a standard but then again, at least I had a standard. You can design for IE6 and be sure it would "just work" everywhere because IE6 was the only option. Market share in the mid 90's IIRC.

The real crime is, as you went on to explain, the utter stagnation. And of course insult was added to injury when Firefox was released. For years then we DID legitimately have the trouble of designing for one modern browser and one curmudgeon who just happened to still have 4/5th's of the market. Lame.

Exactly. The web had to bend to IE, not the other way around.

The fact that that bending resulted in IE6 still being able to mostly display websites today is not any sort of testament to IE6's quality as a browser.

Working as a developer right now, I can tell you that even IE10 has odd, noncompliant quirks. And then there's IE9 and IE8 to support as well.

Yep, a couple that I've found include no support for cursor: none (even though IE9 supports it), and a rendering bug around using gradient backgrounds on tr:hover.

I'm not even doing that much actual web work right now and still I stumbled over Chrome, Opera and Safari bugs in the last year. IE 10 works surprisingly well, the only thing I had less problems with was FF.

Many individual customers you might be able to blame, but as a group, they are best considered as simply a Force of Nature with no capacity to accept responsibility. Many of them can't upgrade because their on old machines with old OSs, or because they're on a work machine and their company has policies about these things (which can probably also be traced back to Microsoft), or because they are just plain technically incompetent (and while one may decide to blame them for that, it's not fair to double-count when it makes them incapable of choosing to not use IE6, or 7, or 8). And those who can and do upgrade have little capacity to make any different in the rest of this enormous group. Since "consumers" as an aggregate are therefore incapable of fixing the problem, it makes little sense to lay all the blame on them.

Microsoft, on the other hand, is in a position to fix everything for the consumers, and they so far choose not to.

I thought the comment was beautiful... many of us have ten years (or more) of pent up aggression towards IE.

These days I am still wary of that browser because it is Windows only and they have poor support for their legacy OS releases.

>Microsoft has given customers a choice on whether to update their browser or not

No. MS links new browser updates to OS releases. You can still run plenty of modern browsers on XP... just not one made by MS. How sad.