That is a good thing for anyone who works in the web world and has to get CSS and even Javascript to work with Internet Explorer. Older versions of Safari are less hassle than IE. From the article:

ComputerWorld is reporting that Firefox is set to hit 20% market share next month according to metrics firm Net Applications. In some communities, Firefox is already well beyond the 20% mark. W3Counter's global web stats, for example, puts Firefox usage at closer to 29% and over 50% of ReadWriteWeb readers use Firefox.

Internet Explorer's popularity peaked in 2003 or 2004, depending on whose data you look at, with a browser share of between 91% and 96%. Now, IE's market share has slipped below 80% by most metrics. Firefox, meanwhile, has grown steadily year-over-year from under 1% in 2004, to around 20% today.

It is well deserved. Firefox is an outstanding product.

We recently had an issue in development with Internet Explorer's Operation Aborted error. It halts the loading of the page nicely [not] to the horror of developer's everywhere but since most development and debugging is done on Firefox courtesy of the exceptionally useful firebug tool it often gets missed or caught at the last moment.

The Internet Explorer javascript compiler/runtime is not always accurate in its error throwing. In fact it nearly never is, and the actual error thrown is an emergent issue relating to a deeper fault. In our case the Operation Aborted was a related error that Internet Explorer had issues with. But that is the purpose of quality control and taking the development code through strict levels of testing before publishing into production.

Sitemeter seems to have skipped that step. Websites that embedded their javascript appeared one morning on IE browsers with the Operation Aborted error. Via ReadWriteWeb:

A bug found in both the javascript and HTML widget made thousands of sites using Sitemeter inaccessible earlier today including popular blogs such as PerezHilton.com, Gizmodo, Valleywag, and Problogger. When users would visit any sites using Sitemeter, they would be presented with an error message pop-up:

Javascript is becoming the glue that enables client-side applications in browser to offer something akin to the desktop experience. Part of its appeal is that it is widely embedded in all browsers out of the box.

This also means there is a wide range of javascript runtimes that the code has to run on with all the idiosyncrasities and permutations that come with it. It can be annoying, especially in the sub-par implementations from the many versions of Internet Explorer - however - it is no excuse to get something as badly wrong as Sitemeter did.

That is consistent with what see where I am employed (2009).

A project on code.google is getting some airtime (reddit, hn, etc) called sevenup. It boasts, "Help rid the world of IE6 with one line of javascript!". By adding the sevenup js file and an event on the body tag IE6 users are faced with the CSS;

The company I work for does about 200 million a year in revenue. We know that nearly 75-80% of our users are on Internet Explorer, and of those users, approximately 25% use IE6. So that is around 20% of all customers. Giving customers the sevenup popup is not only arrogant, it will drive them away, and potentially lower revenue by approximately 40 million.

We have very few issues supporting IE6, there is only the odd bug here and there relating to the IE6 browser explicitly. It is small enough an amount that we usually joke with whoever gets the bug. By accommodating IE7 into our design we cover IE6's rendering rules such that we don't have to write CSS or HTML explicitly for IE6.

In reality it is engineering snobbery. Customers don't care. They will use whatever is the most convenient for them. By claiming technological altruism it only makes engineers look silly. Putting a sign on the VHS racks saying you can't buy these videos because they are inferior to Beta would have been suicide. So is IE6 warnings - and for that matter warnings about firefox and webkit too.