Ars Technica posted this article.  While the author makes some interesting point, I don’t believe he understands what IE is for Microsoft.  Unlike Firefox, Opera, and in most respects Chrome, IE is part of Microsoft’s OS platform and as such the more open and interactive development process the author suggests would be inappropriate.  While getting feedback is important, nightly builds are more useful as a way of getting input from the developers of the browser and not people the write applications for the browser.  Whether Microsoft should be releasing more betas to web application developers or not is very much debatable, but nightly builds are clearly inappropriate.  The article seems highly critical of Microsoft continuing to support IE6.  I’ll agree that IE6 is a pain to develop for and I wish the Internet would migrate away from supporting it.  However, Microsoft can not afford to drop support for it as long as XP is supported.  Internet Explorer (for better or for worse) is to deeply tied in to Windows XP for Microsoft to be able to continue to support XP without supporting IE6.  Also, IE6 is still being used by many corporate customers on their intranet.  These corporations may have made an arguably bad choice to tie their custom applications to IE6 specific rendering, but Microsoft can not simply say “You made a bad choice integrating your application to our platform. You must upgrade or we won’t support you.” without risking a sizable chunk of money they receive each year in support and services contracts.  I think the author would be surprised to find out that there are still a lot of corporate customers out there that are running Windows 2000 (or even earlier) as their standard platform, have applications that integrate IE and have no plans to change any time soon.  What it comes down to is that as long as Microsoft continues to tightly integrate their browser and OS they will be forced as a consequence of that decision to support whatever browser comes with that OS until that OS becomes unsupported.  From a developer standpoint it is not a pretty situation, but it is reality.