I say fork IE6, in this day and age I cant believe its still in use. Seriously people you've had enough time to update your in house software to use modern browsers. Get with the program or get left behind.

I didn't use to be a fan of WebKit but since they are proving to be the pioneer of HTML5 I'm gaining a new respect for it. 

The issue is that SMF2 does support IE6 nearly perfectly, and the little man inside me keeps saying, "if they do, why don't you!"... But OTOH another little man says "that's precisely because they support it that they can't move forward in terms of design"...
So, long ago I chose the mid-way solution: make sure it's usable in IE6, but screw any concepts of 'making it look the same as other browsers'... The problem is that IE7 is also quite hard to keep in line. Not as hard as IE6, but still annoying. And IE6+IE7 = not a negligible market share.
Thankfully, most of the IE6 users are in China (about a third of the users over there...), so if you don't plan to have a Chinese version of your website or to appeal to Chinese users in general, then you don't need to bother with IE6 at all.

As for vertical alignment, my main problem really is that even for modern browsers, providing flawless alignment requires at least one extra div nesting (a display:table then a series of display:table-cell). I just... Don't like that. Also, because it uses a table layout, I would need to change the order in which cells are shown (with a float layout, it's: left-right-center, while a table layout has a more regular left-center-right.)
So basically, let's just say that I made a lot of fixes to that six months ago, and I'm not in a hurry to rewrite these fixes just to make it all work in a table layout.
In the end, I decided against going inline-block or table, and staying with my current solution. After all, it works... It just doesn't work *as well* when the header takes at least two rows. But OTOH, this would never happen in a normal situation -- only place where it COULD happen is the current posthead (a custom header that shows the topic title in large characters, surrounded by previous/next topic links in plain view). And guess what? From the beginning this one had a table layout anyway...

Ah, you have no idea how lonely it is to get into vertical alignments...
I don't know if it's related, but the resulting commit will be revision.... 666.

 

Just signed in. 

Okay... Guys?
We think it's about time we went public with our URL and official website.

So, without further ado... The fork's name is Wedge!

And you can read about it and discuss it here: http://wedge.org

Hope you'll like what you'll see! (Well, you won't see a lot of things as we haven't published screenshots on the public area yet, but it'll come in time...)

patiently waiting 

but i have noticed some higher queries. I'd like to keep on 20 queries and below. 

Yeah... What matters is performance, not the number of queries. You'd be surprised at how one single unoptimized query can be slower than the remaining 19 queries put together. Just get one query on a large table to generate a filesort, and it's doomed.

Anyway, I don't really see the point. wedge.org isn't running Wedge and thus it only reflects the performance of SMF, not Wedge itself. Although I don't think there'll be a noticeable change in these numbers in the final version, I'm hoping that users will get a feeling that Wedge is faster and leaner. (I want to insist on the feeling idea. This is, to me, the most important factor in website loading speed.)

How could you tell? No live website exists that's running Wedge so far...

He used the force? 

"May The Wedge be with you..."