If IE6 did everything that a user wanted, why should he have to update? I totally disagree with this assumption that we should always have to be on the update treadmill, always changing the software we're using, and if we don't, then it's some kind of user failure showing "we cannot be trusted". Maybe if IE6 was so terrible, Microsoft shouldn't have released it in the first place. Don't blame the user.
The only good justification I can think of to update totally working software that I am happy with, is for mitigating security vulnerabilities. And even then, the choice should be on the user.
> If IE6 did everything that a user wanted, why should he have to update?
It often didn't, but the user was not always in control. Many business and educational environments held back and their users were in locked down machines (for good reasons) so could not upgrade if they wanted to.
This had a secondary effect: parents in households where the kids weren't in control of the tech were wary to upgrade in case it made them incompatible with work or things the kids needed for school.
> Maybe if IE6 was so terrible, Microsoft shouldn't have released it in the first place.
As has been mentioned a few times, upon release IE6 was the best browser commonly available by a number of metrics. Netscape was properly stagnating around then, Firefox was not yet a thing (even under is earlier names), chrome was even further off, and other alternatives only captured a niche market. A lot changed between then and 2009 but IE6 didn't.
> this assumption that we should always have to be on the update treadmill
This wasn't the enshitification treadmill that we experience today. Newer browsers at the time were offering key benefits for performance and security as well as significant useful features for designers that had to be inefficiently polyfilled or rejected if you needed to support older UAs.
> mitigating security vulnerabilities. And even then, the choice should be on the user.
No. As much as I disparage Windows for being the OS that can't be trusted not to randomly reboot if you leave it unattended for 12 hours, security updates are everybody's problem if you get infested with something that goes on to affect the wider network.
The only good justification I can think of to update totally working software that I am happy with, is for mitigating security vulnerabilities. And even then, the choice should be on the user.