Microsoft builds stuff that's meant to last for an ungodly long time, and mostly they do it pretty decently. IE6 is still a standard because they built it to be a standard, and it has endured as a standard.
This means it's hanging on, old and crusty and hard to use, when its contemporaries are long dead and thoroughly unlamented.
I hate a lot of Java for this, too. That's not a good idea on my part either. Building this way is a specific market niche and we are all better off that there are products that fit that niche.
You and I are not looking for products in that niche, but we should both give thanks that it exists.
> Microsoft builds stuff that's meant to last for an ungodly long time, and mostly they do it pretty decently. IE6 is still a standard because they built it to be a standard, and it has endured as a standard.
IE6 is still standard because of customer lock-in, it was so littered with quirks and outright bad ideas that it still is very hard to replace and no-one, not even microsoft, is willing to replicate its behaviours.
A prime example of why one should still hate Bill Gates.
At the time, IE6's chief competitor was a bloated, slow, crashing version of Netscape. My first job after high school and before college was that of a web developer. If I recall correctly, we damned Netscape just as much for being so bad, as IE 4 and 5. "Cross-browser compatibility" -> FML. If you omitted the border attribute a table suddenly got 2 pixels of cell spacing in Netscape. Agony all around.
AOL completely blew it when they acquired Netscape.
You can't explain a drop from a 85-90% market share to 3-5% over the course of 6 years with shady MS tactics alone.
> At the time, IE6's chief competitor was a bloated, slow, crashing version of Netscape.
At the time IE6 was released, every competitor of Internet Explorer had already been pushed out of the marked by the illegal bundling of IE4 and 5 with Windows 98.
Microsoft had a precise Embrace, Extend, Extinguish strategy for the World Wide Web, IE4 was the Embrace, IE5 and IE6 were the Extend and then the IE team was disbanded and the plan was to never release a new version ever again (Extinguish).
So, the reason IE6 is so hard to be compatible with is not just because "it's old" but because it was meant to be hard to be compatible with ("Extend") and it lasted so long because it was never meant to be replaced with anything (Extinguish).
I'm surprised people couldn't see this happen 10 years ago, when Microsoft screwed us over, I'm even more surprised that some people don't see it now that the screwing over has happened. We should learn something from history.
This means it's hanging on, old and crusty and hard to use, when its contemporaries are long dead and thoroughly unlamented.
I hate a lot of Java for this, too. That's not a good idea on my part either. Building this way is a specific market niche and we are all better off that there are products that fit that niche.
You and I are not looking for products in that niche, but we should both give thanks that it exists.