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In typical MS fashion it didn't get good until 3 versions later, IE4, before getting proprietary vendor lockin with that piece of shit IE6.

If IE6 was such a piece of shit, as you put it, that implies that the other browsers at the time were much worse than that. You've inadvertently made a profound statement about the browser landscape of the day. IE6 rightfully earned infamy in its unnaturally long life even more repugnant is rampant revisionism. IE introduced a feature that is the foundation of today's web, some of you might be aware of the XMLHttpRequest object, for the non-developers it's like the force now, all around us. JavaScript support and performance, CSS support. Unfortunately this period had to occur, and it will occur again once these lessons are forgotten; Without the stranglehold IE6 eventually obtained, and more importantly stagnated the web with, the choices we have today wouldn't exist.

Their stupidity of not being able to down-grade IE or simultaneously install different versions so web developers could test ALL the various versions, forcing people to rely on hacks like SandBoxie, was absolutely retarded.

As much as it pains me to say Microsoft wasn't unique in this regard, as an aside, try installing multiple versions of Safari. Even the easy mode package managers don't support multiple versions of browsers out of the box (not to say it's difficult). Internet Explorer 6 released in 2001 following the launch of Windows XP. For those unfamiliar with their history, Web Development of that era revolved around IE and Netscape. With IE being the Chrome of its day (as in "works here, onward!") since the browser market was 90%+ IE and IE6 was supported on Windows 98, NT, and 2k. Low usage for potential targets results in a chicken and the egg problem. Low single digits just aren't a priority for many shops, see Opera.

Sandboxie came out in 2004ish and has its uses, especially on 32bit machines. However, for web development involving IE it's much easier to use MultiIE which has been around since 2006. IETester is worth another mention. Not to mention there are alternatives due to the ever growing number of devices and variants released year after year, requiring a different approach such as farms that show screenshots from targeted browsers. Regarding the hassle of Sandboxie, limiting yourself to one tool is pretty silly.

This is a little off topic. Since this criticism is being framed as a Microsoft issue you might be shocked to discover how apps and to a lesser extent websites, are developed and tested in 2015 on devices manufactured and supported by multiple vendors. This process requires physical devices, in many cases multiple to support the popular OS versions on them (there are other OS, but they're less than 8%). Think it's a hack to wrangle Sandboxes or multiple installations, try wrangling devices that let you only upgrade! But what about device simulators, one might ask? Oh yes, they do exist and they're improving but there isn't a substitute for deploying and testing on device. IE variants are a dwindling piece of the very large fragmentation pie.

Microsoft writing the browser from scratch, is too little, too late.

Too late for whom? W

I'll just leave this here:

IE Tester

And:

A Whole Collection of Windows VMs

Now the customer wants the product tested on IE8, forcing me to upgrade

Hello, this might save your ass like it saved mine. I'm not affiliated with them in any way. It allows you to run the rendering engines for multiple Internet Explorer browsers without having them installed. The stand alone IEs were a pain in the ass to get working on Windows 7 64bit, while the performance isn't great it sure beats having to load a Windows VM to test your site/application with.

I'd recommend IETester to them. It's buggy and crashes often, but lets you test in IE6-IE9 on Windows 7, as long as you're on IE8. Updating to IE9 breaks compatibility on a couple of versions. You have to block that update as it's now an automatic update to IE9.

What's their problem? I'm using virtualized IE* instances to test web sites:
IETester
Spoon

Multiple versions of IE can be done courtesy of here or here

And as for IE6 keeping people away from sites like YouTube.. I'm not even going to dignify that with a refutation. Anyone who wants to get around that problem could do so without the slightest difficulty in the space of about ten minutes.

The answer to to both of these is two words: "Group Policy". Group policy allows IT admins to lock down almost everything imaginable. But (in my experience) it will not work properly with multiple IE. And, yes, I can block youtube along with any other site that requires specific plugins with no problem at all, just disable {INSERT-GUID-OF-CONTROL-HERE}, .

Multiple versions of IE can be done courtesy of here or here

Also here Stuck on IE6? Upgrade to Linux! :)

Sorry, but having RTFA, I still can come back to just one reason for still using IE6: Ignorance.

Okay, so there's companies that have IE6-only apps. That's no reason to not upgrade: Nobody forces you to have only one browser. Even if you don't want to have IE6 and Firefox, you can have two versions of IE itself installed. You can set up the hideously-insecure IE6 to only be able to access the company intranet where you need it, and use IE7 or 8 for the rest of the world where having a more-modern, more-secure browser is useful.

Multiple versions of IE can be done courtesy of here or here

Old hardware can run Firefox just fine - I used Portable Firefox for years when I was working for an IE-only company. You don't have to use the browser your company installs on your machine if you don't want to.

And as for IE6 keeping people away from sites like YouTube.. I'm not even going to dignify that with a refutation. Anyone who wants to get around that problem could do so without the slightest difficulty in the space of about ten minutes. This sounds more like a fairy story from the IT depertments to clueless PHB's: "Don't worry, boss, we don't need to block YouTube, it doesn't work with our browser. Not get out of my cubicle so I can watch the latest Foamy the Squirrel video, wouldya?"

The jokes on them. I only test my websites in IE6 (IETester) to see how fucked up they look. Then I LOL.

Actually, I would have thought a good developer would be trying to make sure that their pages looked exactly as they wanted them in any browser within reason. It's just as wrong to use IE only code that will work only with some of the customer's browsers as expected as it is to write code that the other half of your market won't be able to view or it will look terrible.

The jokes on them.
I only test my websites in IE6 (IETester) to see how fucked up they look.
Then I LOL.

ietester. I'm actually testing it and it seems to work properly. It even renders acid test 3 like the original browsers.

IETester

You're looking for IE Tester.
It does pretty much what you describe, and even goes back to IE5.5.

You know, for general web browsing I don't find the extensions that useful. I used to be a heavy extension user, but after a while I figured out I didn't really use all those extensions often enough to be worth it.

For web app development however, I agree that firefox is the absolute king of browsers because of the extensions. These are the dev extensions I can't do without:
- Firebug (duh)
- Remove cookies for site
- HTML Validator

There are a lot of extensions for IE as well, but they're much harder to find out about. I've recently been toying with DebugBar + Companion.JS on IE, and they're pretty useful. No comparison to firebug, that's for sure, but sufficient for me to not be constantly aggravated at the general uselessness of IE.