Agreeing with your general sentiment, what are the specific kinds of technical issues that come up with IE? I've kept all the sites I manage browser-independent (some people call that "primitive"), so what am I missing by not building in features that would make me want my visitors to not use IE?
what am I missing by not building in features that would make me want my visitors to not use IE?
I'm guessing the answer is: Clients. I haven't had one yet whose site was so simple that it avoided issues with IE6. Of course, you might have clients who are less demanding or have more austere tastes, in which case they're really smart because working around IE bugs costs money.
The easiest way to answer your question is to point you at this catalog of IE's deficiencies:
IE, particularly IE6, is a great illustration of PG's observation:
The distinguishing feature of nasty little problems is that you don't learn anything from them... writing an interface to a buggy piece of software doesn't teach you anything, because the bugs are random.
I was just thinking about this one again, and here's a proposed solution:
Create an anti IE6 Coalition.
Here me out - you'd have one central website stating the purpose and all. If you wanted to join the cause, all you would have to do is place a javscript tag on your website. If it detects IE6, a message appears at the top talking about how IE6 hurts innovation, wastes millions of dollars a year, etc. and links to IE8, FF3, and Chrome for quick and simple upgrades. If you got a good deal of bloggers to use/talk about the script, you'd be able to spread the message. The goal isn't the eradication of IE6 usage, just enough demolition of IE6 that people don't feel the need to design around it.
A large part of the problem is that while (nearly) everybody would benefit from IE6 fading away, there's a strong incentive for individual parties to still support it (especially if they're the only one): blocking IE6 means losing a relatively large amount of customers. It's a prisoner's dilemma-esque situation.
IMHO, the best solution I've heard is to offer a discount for customers who are not using IE6, and politely but clearly note that the cost is greater because IE6 is so old and buggy that supporting it requires a lot of extra work, "but switching is easy...[links].". Testing the user agent string is probably enough -- people who know how to change their user agent will know how to install a new browser, but probably can't because of e.g. IT department policies).
I don't really want to be one of those people who insists on derailing perfectly good jokes by taking them seriously. But in this case I have to tell you: The answer to your question is "John Resig and the rest of the jQuery team".
In my experience JS is the least of my problems with IE6, because jQuery just works.
What if the computer is too old to run Firefox 3? Serious question.
My fiancee was fixing up an old computer to give to our nephew, and when she tried to install Firefox, it refused, essentially saying, "Your computer is too old." * She grabbed a 2.x install file from OldApps.com, but many of the people still running IE6 won't be tech savvy enough to do that, and are likely to be running really old computers. (And even when FF can be installed, it tends to suck up memory. What do you do with a computer that maxes out at 128MB ram?)
* I think it was a memory issue, but mainly I remember that it was unexpectedly off-putting.
Fair enough. I'm just saying that a kneejerk "use firefox!" doesn't necessarily help: it isn't that simple.
Whether you should really need so much computing power just run a web browser is a different matter entirely. My cell phone probably has more processing power (and definitely has far more memory and storage) than my desktop computer did when I was in high school.
Bonus points if you can take out IE7 as well.