I can't say I understand your analogy. For me, developing a site that renders correctly in WebKit, Firefox and Opera takes X amount of time, whereas adding just

I can't say I understand your analogy. For me, developing a site that renders correctly in WebKit, Firefox and Opera takes X amount of time, whereas adding just IE6 support takes something like 2*X additional time. WebKit plays nice with standards (it was one of the first to be ACID2 compliant) and it's open source. When IE and Netscape were the big players, neither did a good job at standards support IIRC, and one browser rendered content completely different from the other (then again, websites were much simpler back then, so it wasn't as obvious). I don't see how that era is comparable to this one. Also, my understanding is one of the big reasons why Microsoft stopped innovating IE is because so many developers left after 6's release, and Microsoft became complacent with its skeleton crew. This might have been systemically caused by the DOJ lawsuit, but either way it's not a legitimate excuse. IE6 held the web back for years, which played into Microsoft's interest of maintaing its desktop paradigm. I don't think that's a coincidence. I actually like Microsoft for the most part (I even worked for them), but IE6 is (was?) like an abusive relationship.