What I find especially frustrating, though, is how Microsoft forces me to spend so much time pampering their software. Yes, I'm talking about Internet Explorer, the iconoclastic web browser that refuses to acknowledge web standards.

How much online productivity is lost trying to get websites to look and function properly on Internet Explorer?

That would be an interesting question to explore. Talk to just about any web designer, and they will tell you that, for every 100 hours they spend on design, 50-60 hours are dedicated to actual design, and the rest is devoted to creating xhtml and CSS hacks to get it to work on Internet Explorer.

This is just as true today.

It's getting to the point where we're thinking of adding IE6 compatibility as a separate line item on our proposals and agreements. After all, when you're spending 35-50% of your theming time just trying to get a cool new design to work on one rather archaic browser, it's no small matter.

It's a ≈40% tax on web theming.

How can we get out of this? Thanks to Microsoft market share and IT departments' resistance to upgrading, I fear we're not going to be able to say a final good-bye to IE6 anytime soon.

Sophia Locero points to the IE Death March and several other like minded efforts to build a collective movement to simply drop IE6 support, and asks:

So many parties are restless about the state of web browsing, and rather than wait for Microsoft to get its act together, they take it upon themselves to do something about it. It doesn’t really stop with the viral websites. Every few months or so you’ll find a blog post that details how the author has had it with IE (IE6 usually) and that he has resolved to drop support for the browser completely.

One must ask: are any of them making a significant difference in the market share of IE? Or IE6, specifically?

I don't think so. Here at pingVision, nearly every one of our clients requires IE6 compatibility for their web projects, and I don't think that's because they're unthinking or naive about browsers. The fact is that their audience -- and, quite often, their own organizations -- are locked into IE6 by their IT departments.

Will 37 Signals' dropping of IE6 support make a dent in their market? Perhaps not, since their audience is probably already heavily skewed towards Firefox anyway. But our B2B clients would likely see a huge drop-off in traffic if their sites did not support the IE6 that still permeates corporate desktops and workstations the world over.

Still, what we have here is a tax on productivity, and if Microsoft did one thing to help the online economy, it would simply EOL IE6 altogether. Right. Now.

Meanwhile, we'll consider adding the "Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 Tax" to our estimates as a line item for all clients to see.