Like a phone.

It seems that IE has been a consistent impediment to web based technologies for upwards of 10 years now. There have been so many other things that have been horribly crippled because 'internet explorer doesn't support it'.

People are becoming more and more savvy from the standpoint of computer use, and putting up a redirect to install a new web browser... like Chrome or Firefox... is something the majority of people should be able to handle/understand.

I'm tired of waiting 10 years to actually use the technology that we have /today/.

This is patently untrue. In 1999, IE was the best available browser (Netscape would have been your other option).

It wasn't until Firefox in 2005 that a real alternative emerged (IMHO).

Sorry to be nitpicky, but it matters.

I'd go so far as to say that it was 2008 before something genuinely better came along in the form of Chrome. Firefox did a good job of getting Microsoft to release IE7, but it was never compellingly better in the way that Chrome is.

people dont upgrade unless they have a reason to, not because there is a better rendering engine or more plugins, by pulling your hair out and slowing yourself down to work on support for ie, you are also giving users a reason to not upgrade.

but (IT wont let you install firefox because x only works on ie6) works both ways, if the rest of the web shoots forward with these new technologies, companies will catch up.

I think the bigger issue is that Microsoft doesn't bother adhering to standards;

Or they make up their own standards when there are already perfectly good standards that provide the same functionality;

Or they implement part of a standard, but certain stuff is completely wrong, and when it is pointed out, they don't do anything about it.

And then they force you to conform their arbitrary non-standard stuff, because they can bully you with their 70% market share.

This isn't just about being slow, its about their course history of being slow AND maliciously protectionist AND incompetent.

And they should get ditched if they continue to behave in such a manner.

DOM, CSS, Box Model, Events, SVG, and a bunch of other things they did before anybody else (in a straightforward and reverse-engineerable way) were ignored by later groups who put together slightly incompatible "standards", some of which had no reference implementation. NN6, for example, was out for a full year before it implemented the W3C Events model that the Netscape team had proposed (which of course didn't exactly match the reference implementation that IE5 had in place 2 years earlier).

It's only recently that the Standards folks have managed to spec out things that the IE group hadn't done yet.