Because to recommend that people leave IE6 is to work together with Microsoft (a company which has no more desire to keep supporting IE6 than anyone else) rather than making a large and powerful enemy.
Because anyone who is still using IE6 is statistically likely to have reasons (real or imagined) for sticking with browsers in the IE family. Why fight that, when the payoff for merely getting them out of IE6 is so great?
And because any program to get people to switch browsers subtly encourages people to try something other than IE. 100% of the world's IE6 users are IE users, but less than 100% of world's former IE6 users are IE users.
I'm not sure if you're being facetious or not, but it's because 7 & 8 are much more standards compliant and take way less time to hack on to get working. Plus they have a huge market share.
I think he means why not get rid of IE all together? 7 & 8 are more standards compliant than 6 (which isn't saying much), but they still are lagging behind Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera.
Depends what you mean by 'standards'. 7 & 8 support more of CSS 2.1 than the other browsers.
I believe support for CSS3 is lacking because they didn't want to write to a draft, and then have to support no-longer-standard extensions when the draft changed.
Completely anecdotal, and kind of a throwback to the Netscape days, but in recently redoing our site, the main things that I had to fix to get things working with IE 8 were actually bugs in our HTML. There was only one issue that we had where the fault wasn't ours.
I'm sure that IE8 is still comparatively the bottom of the barrel, but the gap seems to have narrowed pretty significantly. (Incidentally, IE7 still gave us large enough problems that we decided to just set things up so that it degraded reasonably when using IE7.)
