Cumulatively, developers and clients paid millions in billable hours for their neglect in monopoly.
They couldn't warm up to me even if they swapped their board of directors with Sesame Street characters.
Or have you conveniently forgotten which browser that was introduced in?
One day you should download the version of Netscape that was around when IE6 came out.
Of course, Microsoft later added the proper XMLHttpRequest support that was lacking in until IE7, IIRC.
And then they sat on it for 4 years, refusing to fully implement the CSS 2.1 spec, refusing to fix ridiculous positioning bugs, and even refusing to fix security flaws that they mandated non-critical, although several of them used together often lead to arbitrary code execution on the client.
Like it is with User Experience in general, they ruined all the positive cred they had with IE6, causing standards-aware web devs to develop for the lowest-common denominator or invest their own time on every project for Microsoft's technical debt.
It's not fair that IE6 quirking was a required skill and a to-do for web developers, only because Microsoft had a browser share monopoly. Was it to slow down the evolution towards applications/operating system in the cloud? Mere negligence? I don't care anymore, they broke my heart.
Source?
Anyway, even worse, back in the IE 5.x era when they added most of that stuff like XMLHTTPRequest etc., they focused on that instead of complying with even basic CSS1! (Yes, it was better than Netscape 4, but that was because the JSSS/CSS fiasco that resulted in was a lot worse) IE6 added DOCTYPE switching and a "standards" mode with better CSS1 compliance, but I don't think they touched the buggy CSS2 support, and during the time they sat on it, guess what people did with it that caused trouble when MS released IE7 that fixed some of these bugs?