I feel a lot of sympathy for your post but you're opening up the whole browser compat' vs. standards compliance vs. cost of support debate.Today there is a large ground swell to force out IE6 (http://www.netmag.co.uk/zine/discover-culture/calling-time-on-ie6) but we "all" know that a large number of users are behind company policies and don't have a choice in their browser but then if we pander to non-working browsers and write even more sniffed out code and provide different experiences (e.g. use of CSS3) then the support budget will rocket. You just have to look and the amazing number of backward-compat' options IE8 has to see the mess we're in.

Funny that all the anger has always been directed at IE. Fiveyears ago, the bad boy was Netscape. Every version and sub version would render web sites differently. It really was the hardest browser to target. But IE was always the one getting slagged off....

I think it's important to realise that the browser is effectively the platform now. Would you write a forms app for Windows and then sell it to Mac users without testing it? Of course not. You're always going to have to test for each environment, whether it's a web app or forms app. You always have to test the app, and make sure it works wherever it's going to be used.

I love this quaint notion that the internet is about standards. Since when? Going back to Netscape, they didn't help by introducing tags like <blink>

If you wanted a standard, would it be the HTML and scripting that's available now? I don't think so. Why can't I do a POST from a hyperlink without scripting? Why can't the HTML naming conventions cope with arrays?

Certainly, there are people who don't like IE. But it still makes up at least 70% of browsing. The 'groundswell' is a bit like the one eight years ago where Linux was supposed to push Windows out. Never happened.

I know it's unfair to harp on about old history, but it was the poor quality of Netscape that ensured corporates only focused on IE for their internal apps. This is completely separate to any home users that are disgruntled. Banks with tens of thousands of employees are not using Firefox or Opera. They're all using IE. That's why IE will be here for a long time to come.

I agree, in my own post http://pdkm.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!D1DDEC9FF002FB8C!1068.entry (RIP I6, goodbye old friend) I think IE6 is (or was) a good browser. The thing I find compelling about the idea of standards is that in theory if you have a collection of browsers where they share say 85% of CSS3 then I can stick to that and the dev costs will be cheaper even though, as you say, I still have to test on all of them. But crucially I simply won't bother to test Netscape, IE3, etc cause I'll state they're unsupported. However, IMO, the whole browser as a platform should have the title of RIP Browser. I know I've spent far too long playing the ping pong of fixing a page for one browser to break it another. That's why I'm embracing tech' like Silverlight with both hands 'cause I doubt the browsers will ever implement the "standards" consistently enough.