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.