> was it incompatible by design or simply by incompetent management?
"Have you stopped beating your wife?"
Seriously, what a dumb question. The answer is "neither": at the time of its release, IE6 was great. It was way better than its only real competition, Netscape 6, which hadn't seen updates in years. Yes, it had bugs, but all software does. If Microsoft had just given it regular updates, it would've been fine. The issue with IE6 was not that it was bad ab initio, it was that Microsoft abandoned development when they felt they had no competition, so it slipped farther and farther behind web standards.
Please don't call questions dumb. It discourages thoughtful conversation. There's a guideline somewhat related to this:
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Unfair questions should be called out. Perhaps "dumb" isn't the most appropriate term, but I do think its fair to challenge the premise of the question. To prevent this leaves a whole rhetorical category immune from challenge.
Offence is taken not given.
I can understand you can feel offended or frustrated when someone behaves in a way you call stupid. However, you could give them the benefit of a doubt and assume they made a mistake or they didn't know better.
Not sure why the snark. I think it's a fair question. Since you take issue with the phrasing, I'll enlarge it to "development & management of IE up to 2006."
They did give it regular updates throughout that period; those updates just never targeted web standards. I'm honestly wondering whether that was through explicit desire (it's a valid business strategy), willful misdirection (not prioritizing "the web"), or management incompetence (inability to deliver desired standards compliance). I've never read / heard anything definitive to explain which of those happened.
There was never any team tasked with working on Trident after IE6 shipped till IE7 work restarted; as far as I'm aware, it was always the case that the IE shell was developed relatively separately to Trident, so those who did do all the work (esp. for later XP SPs) probably scarcely had any knowledge of the Trident codebase to really start trying to fix bugs.
"Have you stopped beating your wife?"
Seriously, what a dumb question. The answer is "neither": at the time of its release, IE6 was great. It was way better than its only real competition, Netscape 6, which hadn't seen updates in years. Yes, it had bugs, but all software does. If Microsoft had just given it regular updates, it would've been fine. The issue with IE6 was not that it was bad ab initio, it was that Microsoft abandoned development when they felt they had no competition, so it slipped farther and farther behind web standards.