> The biggest downfall of Internet Explorer 6-8 is lack of support for transparent PNGs.<p>No. It's not. The. Biggest downfall is the total lack of advanced CSS selectors, forcing you into adding needless classes and/or additional non-semantic tags.<p>Also, IE 6 and 7 are full of bugs even in the little CSS they support. Transparent PNGs have been solved long ago. So have the various bugs, but the workarounds needed are much more painful to develop and maintain.<p>Using various libraries to patch in missing functionality only seems to work until you reach real-world complexity with your DOM at which point you will run into any of the countless performance issues with IEs JavaScript implementation which relies on COM marshaling for all of its DOM support, so all these patch-ie-to-add-missing-features-using-JS projects are practically nothing but nice demos.<p>The moment you can at least target IE 8 and you can start to rely on CSS having more ore less the intended effect without stacking hack upon hack, the moment you get to use stuff like display: table, that moment you will see how much you miss by staying in the late 90ies with the code you are writing.
To each their own, but this sounds like an enormous nightmare in places. Did they do analysis to determine that support IE6 was worth the developer frustration or the large, large set of features they simply can't use (many of which pilif mentioned, in addition to those mentioned or implied in the article)?