To quote myself from earlier...<p>The IE6 era (2001 to 2005 or 2006) was a period of great creativity, and it was when a lot of dominant web properties became established. Examples include Wikipedia, LinkedIn, Second Life, The Pirate Bay, MySpace, Orkut, Facebook, Gmail, Flickr, OpenStreetMap, YouTube, MegaUpload, Pandora and Twitter.<p>Web 2.0 became popular during that era (2004 onwards).<p>That &quot;stagnation&quot; compares rather well with much of the flashy, transient rubbish being launched nowadays.<p>Also, when it came out, IE6 was the most standards-compliant browser and generally performed better than its main rivals.