How can anyone still use Internet Explorer?

I haven't really used Internet Explorer as my everyday browser since 2006, but until recently I hadn't really realized how bad it is. Back then it was IE 6 and Firefox 1.5, if I'm not mistaken. I preferred Firefox, but still used IE because there was at least one site I had to access, which didn't really look okay in Firefox. When I no longer needed to access that site, I made the full time use move to Firefox and never looked back.

Recently, however, I have been working on a couple of sites and applications which I decided to test with all browsers. You can't imagine my surprise when I found out that the sites looked and worked perfectly on all browsers, except Internet Explorer. (They are fine in Firefox, Safari, Opera and Chrome.) I tried IE 8 in both its native and "compatibility" modes and it not only wasn't able to properly display the sites' images which use alpha-channel for transparency, but the speed for executing the Javascript was ridiculously slow.

For one small website, I redid the layout and got it to work okay on IE. For the applications I just decided that I won't support Internet Explorer. It is a seriously flawed product and I for one am not going to loose my time by trying to make it work as it should. That is what Microsoft should have done.