At the time of IE6's release it was a fantastic browser. That was Microsoft's problem; it was so much better than Netscape at the time (and had such a bundling

At the time of IE6's release it was a fantastic browser. That was Microsoft's problem; it was so much better than Netscape at the time (and had such a bundling advantage) that they totally dominated the market. So Microsoft stopped improving it... and were very slow to realize that they needed to start again after Firefox shook the browser market back up. There were still people criticizing MS back at the time of IE6's launch, of course. But it was more ideological than practical... the open source zealots, rather than every web developer.