Pariah project? People forget IE6 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IE6 was released in 2000 freaking one, for Christ's sake. It was state of the art for years. Sure it started becoming a pain in the ass to developers years later, but it's only a pariah project with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight and years of continued engineering development.

Yeah, but it became SUCH a pain in the ass later on that it's entirely understandable that people would later on not want to be associated with it.

Maybe Opera could have been considered state of the art - but I agree. IE6 was a great browser. It was the delay for IE7 that was the problem.