> Three monolithic releases in an entire decade is a better plan, you think?

Strawman. I said no such thing.

> The technologies involved with the web move too quickly to still be thinking about IE 6 and IE 7 in 2011.

Ah, an interesting perspective of your own, I see. :-)

I need to support the platforms that my customers and/or my clients' customers are using to browse the web. Right now, I'm pleased to say that IE6 is no longer relevant to any current project I'm working on. IE7 still has enough market share to count, but most people I care about in relation to my commercial interests are now on IE8 or IE9. The pace of technology development matters far more to those of us writing web pages than to users, who typically only notice what browser they are using when something doesn't work, and even then only if it did work in some other context.

> All I can assume from that statement is that you're not a javascript or CSS developer.

Why? Because I have a different view to your own? I am currently working on several web-based user interfaces for different commercial projects/clients. They all work just fine in recent IE versions. At the most, we have graceful degradation for a few visual effects if you go back to IE7.

> Yes, about half of the world uses IE - mainly people who don't understand what a browser is, and click the big E on their desktop.

I think this is where we basically disagree. You seem to want to play with shiny new toys. I'm a shiny-loving geek too, but from a business perspective, I care about building useful stuff that benefits the web browsing public, and therefore either my own business interests or those of my clients. It doesn't matter at all to me why IE became the dominant browser for a long time, only that whatever functionality it provided was sufficient to do so. It is just a tool, serving a purpose, like any other browser software.

> IE is a deplorable web browser in the opinion of the vast majority of web developers I've ever encountered.

With due respect, what your web developer friends like isn't really the point. I care about users.

Are those users getting a significantly better experience using other browsers with rapid development cycles rather than IE? I have already listed several fundamental bugs that have resulted from the recent development processes at Google and Mozilla in my earlier post. Those bugs have in several cases visibly affected my or my clients' users. For all its ills, the reason IE6 lasted so long was that Microsoft never retrospectively screwed things up on that scale.

Meanwhile, since we're playing the "in my experience" game, all these fancy new technologies that are half-supported in leading edge Google/Mozilla browsers seem to generate far more heat than light, and I have yet to receive a single request from any client that would benefit from them, nor to my knowledge encountered any web site I use myself as a geek that benefits from them, with the possible exceptions of HTML5 <video> and <canvas>, which of course are only trendy substitutes for things we managed to do before anyway. (I have had to suffer using Google Docs with one client, and to describe it as unreliable, painfully bug-ridden, and missing the most elementary features that desktop office suites have literally had for decades would be rather kind. If that is the future Google are bringing us with all these new toys, I'll stick to tedious installers for Windows software, thanks.)