>> Only for anyone who has forgotten just how wretched and stagnant IE6 was, and how long the web ossified around it,
As a web dev I hate ie6 as much as the next guy. I was in the fortunate position to simply drop ie6 support early (the phrase "use a modern browser" springs to mind.)
But it's worth pointing out that ie6 itself was great when it came out. It wasn't that ie6 was bad, it became bad because it got _old_.
IE brought us AJAX which transformed the web from being a read-only system (with a few forms) to an interactive platform, which is the root from which today's Web grows.
In its time IE6 was great. But a lack of competition caused it to stagnate. MS rested on their laurels.
MS themselves rallied hard against it after IE7 and later came out, but end-users refused to upgrade. They rebranded as Edge to get away from IE. The Trident engine was hard to work on though, and switching to the Blink engine has made Edge completely acceptable.
The problem isn't that one has big market share over the others, its that viable others exist. Basically, if a feature is implemented, it works pretty much the same in all browsers. These days the issue is not different behaviour [1] as much as the speed that new features spread at.
Safari has been the slowest here, although recent improvements there are welcome.
[1] yeah, yeah, there are some differences. But it's nothing like the work necessary to make a site work under IE6 and Firefox 1.
