IE6 was basically the canary in the coalmine. Holding the web back from constant change was a good thing as it let many more implementations be usable. Remember Opera and the various other browsers around at the time? Not long after IE6 died, they got crushed too by Google using change as a weapon against its competitors. The recent notable change of Google requiring JS even for its own search engine, and thereby shutting out simple and basic browsers like Lynx, should be extremely concerning for the future of the web.