> IE6 has been a source of pain for… I'd say four years.
We're in late 2011 right? That puts Paul's "IE6 being a pain" in late 2007, right after the original iPhone was released.
By that time, Firefox 2 was a year old, Firebug was 18 months old, and Safari 3 (the first version with acceptable Javascript support) had just been released, making Drosera (which would morph into the Webkit Developer Tools the next year) available.
Hell, by late 2007 IE7 was a year old already. And a significant reason why the IE project was restarted (and IE7 produced) is developers getting fed up with IE6, its bugs, its antiquated tools and its lack of progress, and Firefox had been getting more and more traction since its 1.0 release in late 2004.
IE6 has been a pain for at least 6 years now. 2005 was Firefox 1.5, the announce for the IE project restart and the grand opening of On Having Layout [0], the tail end of the long, slow and painful discovery of IE6's innumerable rendering bugs, DOM and javascript limitations (anybody else remembers Drip and Joel Webber's "DHTML leaks like a sieve"? That's January 2005), painfully slow runtime & al.
Of course it makes sense that 2005 would have been such a sticking point: the web community had been playing around with CSS since ~2003 (CSS Zen Garden released that year) and was wrapping up the IE6 CSS bugs compendium (see above-mentioned On Having Layout, pretty much the culmination of the effort).
Late 2004 and (especially) 2005 it started to turn its attention from styling to behavior, which lead to the rebirth of Javascript and the creation of modern javascript: AJAX coined (and seminal article on the subject published)? February 2005. Opera Desktop free and ad-free? April 2005 QuirksBlog? December 2004. The killing of "DHTML"? 2005[1]. http://simonwillison.net/2005/Jan/5/swissMaps/http://www.mezzoblue.com/archives/2005/01/06/dhtml_05/index...., ... the javascript frameworks explosion was also 2004 (Dojo) through 2005 (Prototype, Mochikit) to 2006 (jQuery, YUI)
Actually, by late 2003 Phoenix (which is what Firefox used to be called back then) was already an impressive little browser (it was little back then) and IE6 was already horribly outdated and clumsy for those of us who grew a penchant for alternative browsers (the others being Opera and the Mozilla Suite).
I completely agree, but developers-wise it was not a complete pain in the ass yet: it was the "looking forward to meeting you" browser for the development community (having just been renamed Firebird), the community was mostly in its IE5/Mac high and getting started on understanding CSS and trying to get rid of tables.
This would lead down a long and painful road re. IE6, but I think it was just getting started and not feeling it yet. On the Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox front, Chris Pederick's Web Developer Toolbar was still a year away.
(there were, of course, visionaries community wise: PPK published "Separating behavior and structure" in April 2004[0], and the "javascript prophets" were getting out their suggestions on getting event handler bindings out of HTML[1], it's a long gone time when Opera's javascript support was billed "poor" and the first version of Safari had little CSS support and no ability to execute any javascript worth running)
edit: after thinking about it a bit more, i still think 2003 is too early for the IE6 pain point, but my 2005 might be too conservative as well. So I'd put the early pangs in early to mid-2004 for the "wider" community of developers interested in web technologies.
We're in late 2011 right? That puts Paul's "IE6 being a pain" in late 2007, right after the original iPhone was released.
By that time, Firefox 2 was a year old, Firebug was 18 months old, and Safari 3 (the first version with acceptable Javascript support) had just been released, making Drosera (which would morph into the Webkit Developer Tools the next year) available.
Hell, by late 2007 IE7 was a year old already. And a significant reason why the IE project was restarted (and IE7 produced) is developers getting fed up with IE6, its bugs, its antiquated tools and its lack of progress, and Firefox had been getting more and more traction since its 1.0 release in late 2004.
IE6 has been a pain for at least 6 years now. 2005 was Firefox 1.5, the announce for the IE project restart and the grand opening of On Having Layout [0], the tail end of the long, slow and painful discovery of IE6's innumerable rendering bugs, DOM and javascript limitations (anybody else remembers Drip and Joel Webber's "DHTML leaks like a sieve"? That's January 2005), painfully slow runtime & al.
Of course it makes sense that 2005 would have been such a sticking point: the web community had been playing around with CSS since ~2003 (CSS Zen Garden released that year) and was wrapping up the IE6 CSS bugs compendium (see above-mentioned On Having Layout, pretty much the culmination of the effort).
Late 2004 and (especially) 2005 it started to turn its attention from styling to behavior, which lead to the rebirth of Javascript and the creation of modern javascript: AJAX coined (and seminal article on the subject published)? February 2005. Opera Desktop free and ad-free? April 2005 QuirksBlog? December 2004. The killing of "DHTML"? 2005[1]. http://simonwillison.net/2005/Jan/5/swissMaps/ http://www.mezzoblue.com/archives/2005/01/06/dhtml_05/index...., ... the javascript frameworks explosion was also 2004 (Dojo) through 2005 (Prototype, Mochikit) to 2006 (jQuery, YUI)
[0] http://www.satzansatz.de/cssd/onhavinglayout.html
[1] http://adactio.com/journal/938