I agree with a lot the author's views. The fact is that as long as you cater to problems of the past, you are stuck with them. If you start giving people a c

I agree with a lot the author's views. The fact is that as long as you cater to problems of the past, you are stuck with them. If you start giving people a compelling reason to upgrade, many will. In the LedgerSMB project we made a decision back in 2006 to only support browsers with features that made our lives easier. Because of our i18n framework, we decided to drop all support for all browsers that didn't support button elements per the standard. Yes, at the heigh of IE6, we dropped support for IE6. However, we could do this because would tell businesses "if you want to use LedgerSMB, install Firefox." This wouldn't have worked for the general public, but for the general public we probably wouldn't have done i18n much at all. But anyway we chose buttons because according to the standard, what you display and what is submitted are only loosely coupled, which makes i18n easier (just translate the inner string and leave the value constant). IE6 handled buttons horribly. When you clicked on a button element of type submit it would send the value of all buttons on the form. Worse, it submitted the wrong information (innerHTML instead of value). This made it impossible on the server side to see which buttons were actually clicked. Too bad. Then IE7 came out and it was better. We thought at first we could support it. But we were wrong. IE7 still sent innerHTML instead of value. We had to wait until IE8 to support IE again. I think that this is what the author is getting at when he laments people blaming circumstances they can't control. We looked at it and we asked "what choices do we have? What should we do?" We then decided that we wouldn't be hurt too badly at the time by dropping IE and that turned out to be a good bet. In the end it really is about choices and how we think about them. An e-commerce site may have different choices available than we did. But you make your choices and you do the best you can.