IE6 was propriety and dead. I don't think either propriety vs opensource or dead vs active development are important to the overall question of "is standardizi

IE6 was propriety and dead. I don't think either propriety vs opensource or dead vs active development are important to the overall question of "is standardizing on a single implementation a bad idea?" Yes, the fact it had dropped out of active development made it worse to standardize on, but it was already a bad idea. The same goes for open source. Yes, it can be forked to get away from something bad, but if only one browser/engine becomes standardized on by users and developers, then that engine's team has complete control over what the web becomes regardless of competing implementations are doing. It creates a HUGE hurdle to pull the web in another direction. People weren't "stuck" with IE6 because it wasn't opensource, they were stuck because the distributor wasn't releasing new versions that also did what the competing products wanted supported.