[joel_ms]

Then they decided to stop improving IE6 (outside security updates) because they (correctly) realized that the web was a threat to the company. IE7 was released 5 years later, literally due to the pressure of other browsers on web standards support.

That's when IE 6 sucked, and we all had to live with that suckiness for years on end because of microsofts insane backwards compatibility policies keeping deprecated software alive on life support.

Even Microsoft has a IE6 countdown timer now https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/ie6coun...

IE6 was an unfathomably damaging disaster for the web.