In the wake following the release of Photosynth, many bloggers noted its lack of support for a non-Windows OS and self-deprecating humor.

I’m actually quite fond of this alert box for IE6 users:

But what does this imply for web developers, if anything? Is Microsoft setting precedent to stop supporting IE6? We certainly hope so. It’s nothing but a nightmare of legacy support for those of us who want to build web app UIs in 2008. And they’re not the only ones. 37signals is also phasing out IE6 across all their products.

So is it time for us to follow suit?

Internet Explorer 6 is by far the worst browser on the mainstream market today. It’s finally showing serious decline in recent days, but for small and local business, we’ve found the stats to remain steady and strong. The answer to my question is still “not yet” at this point. We’ve certainly made compromises and restrained some UI effects and application features from being available for IE6 users, but we haven’t completely phased it out of our testing environment.

Maybe one day we will, and I’ll actually thank Microsoft for taking one big step in moving us along.