huh? No, the era of ie6 was marked by the fact that IE6 was dominant, so it no longer mattered whether they were still developing the software, or even keeping up with the new developments of the web. The client stayed anyway, and the web developers couldn’t support new things anyway, because ie6.
This is exactly the situation you get if you only need to support a single browser engine. After that, the competition no longer exists, and with it the impetus for innovation/bug fixes etc.
Safari on mobile is the modern textbook example of this. Development is slow, and things like web app data, push messages, etc. are finally getting done (on the iPhone 14), 10 or more years later than competitors. However, these competitors can’t compete with iPhones, so Apple thinks all is well that way. (In fact, bad web apps that should miss functionality on the iPhone of course don’t affect the Apple App Store)
So the ie6 era was mainly *not* annoying because of the small differences, it was annoying because of the impossible slowness with which we can move forward.
Chrome is now at least such an issue on the wider internet, but thankfully it’s still at a reasonable pace in terms of development. Perhaps because Google still has to win the competition with regular native apps.
