It really is time for IE to die

This is a sentiment that many of us who work on web applications can relate to:

On the face of it, Internet Explorer is just another browser, but it's time to stop drip feeding it, it's time to stop replacing its internal organs when one fails, and it's time to wean it off its nasty oxygen habit. Internet Explorer is old, pathetic, tiring to even look at, and depressing. Microsoft, let it die. (Failing that, just do what you did with OneCare: strip it down, funk it up and start all over again.)

Don't boycott Opera, boycott Internet Explorer. Buy Windows 7 E if you can, or if you don't want to or live in a non-European country, please for the love of God, remove Internet Explorer from your Windows 7 machine.

Internet Explorer jumped the shark around version 6. IE 6 was such a miserable piece of trash that it's amazing that Microsoft released it. Countless security patches and evidence that it had terrible support for web standards certainly did not embarrass them. Each subsequent version of Internet Explorer has only gotten worse, and now there is no point in using it at all at home. Preferring it over Firefox, Chrome, Safari or Opera is like preferring to drive a SUV that gets six miles to the gallon on the highway, can't do a u-turn on less than a four lane highway and that looks like it was the getaway vehicle for an army unit that got ambushed in the green zone. As a product, it is now such a miserable piece of shit that the first instinct of most web developers when they find that someone actually likes it, their first internal reaction is "what the hell is wrong with you."

For the sake of web progress, Microsoft needs to take IE out behind the shed and shoot it. Empty the entire magazine into it. Douse it with gasoline, set it on fire, scoop up the ashes, put them in a bag with a weight on it, and dump the remains in the ocean. From there, they can either create a whole new engine or fork an existing one like WebKit that is actually efficient and good at what it does.