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Here, I'll say something more constructive, rather than just criticizing browsers I've never used.

Firefox: The only real browser right now. Supports a bunch of anti-crapware plugins (like adblock plus, which gets rid of /. ads) and general power-user scripts for those who want them. Aside from that, its everywhere on every platform that supports any form of graphical manager.

Still starts to lag if it hasn't been restarted in a while, although it's gotten a lot better about it lately. It does have very many good add-ons, and I've only found around three bugs in its rendering engine, ever (and one of them had to do with nested tables, which shouldn't be used, anyway). However, it's much slower than Safari or Opera about passing the Acid tests.

The problem with add-ons is that the more you have, the slower Firefox gets (and the more cluttered the interface gets - I still haven't figured out how to get rid of all the addons adding their logos to the bottom right).

Remember, add-ons (such as GreaseMonkey, Adblock, Tab Mix Plus) are different from plugins (such as Flash, Java, Silverlight).

IE: MS has had to work because they prior have sucked and dragged down most every website that does "IE only" websites. It's a good thing that Firefox and standards are taking a front seat.

Well, it's arguably "not bad" now. Although I don't use it much, my impression is that it can't get you viruses just by accidentally clicking the wrong link these days. And its standards support is steadily improving, although it still has weird bugs crop up, it doesn't support more modern technologies (SVG, canvas, HTML 5's <video> tag...), and I often have to use weird hacks like hasLayout to get it to render correctly. It's also very slow compared to other modern browsers.

Still, it's on par with last-generation browsers, which means it's come a long way from the mess that was IE6.

Opera: They're still around on X86 platforms? I thought they died out and only did DS and Wii browsers and diddled with X86 adware. Havent looked at them since their software didnt fit on a floppy.

It's a pretty good browser, and still as fast as ever. Its benefits include coming with most of the functionality built-in that Firefox requires plug-ins for, as well as support for GreaseMonkey scripts to add the rest of the functionality. The benefit is that its interface is nowhere near as slow as Firefox with all those plugins.

Notably, it's the only browser here that doesn't have inline find with Ctrl+F (even IE does these days), but inline find can be brought up with the / button.

It's also one of the few browsers resistant to JavaScript alert DoSing.

Chrome: eh? Its alpha buggyware with none of the plugins we're used to. Im not going to even look at it until it has more what I would consider basic features.

For "alpha buggyware", it doesn't have very many bugs, and is as stable as any other browser. In addition, its interface is very well done, and arguably much easier to use than any other browser currently available. What would you consider basic features? Nightlies even have GreaseMonkey support.

It's also the only other browser on this list resistant to JavaScript alert DoSing.

Safari: I dont own a mac. I dont care to own a mac. And I dont even want to pirate OSX for my very compatible Thinkpad-T61 to run it. And pretty much every software ported from OSX to Windows is bad, and I mean BAD.

Safari on a Mac is a very good browser. It lacks Ctrl+Tab to switch tabs, GreaseMonkey-like functionality, or ad blocking. Aside from these, it's the fastest browser around, especially in nightlies.

Safari on Windows works fairly well. Aside from the debatably ugly color scheme

I can easily set up a three-column layout without tables. It's not that hard as people make it out to be (especially considering that people have already set everything up* for you), and it produces cleaner code than a table-based solution.

* Unfortunately, the Holy Grail layout has an annoying IE bug. Here's a fix.

The issue you describe in IE has probably nothing to do with the nesting and everything to do with hasLayout. Also, if you've got more than 2 or 3 <div> inside each-other, you should re-evaluate what you're doing and probably use a more appropriate element (ul, ol, dl, p, h1-h6, etc).

The table on that page is rather misleading. While in theory IE6 'supports' almost as much CSS as IE7 (notwithstanding that IE7 massively increased the amount of selectors and pseudo-selectors available), much of this supposed support is broken. IE7 still has its problems, mainly to do with the mysterious layout property, but is a far better implementation of CSS 2.1 than IE6.

• position:relative triggers hasLayout mode for given element, which appears to be a complete, different rendering (sub)engine in IE.
• In CSS spec table elements are exception from all HTML/CSS layouting rules and IE they're even more of an exceptional-exception judging by the fact that display:table is not supported and display on table elements can only change visibility, not layout.
• and on top of that <input> has been source of embarassment for IE already. <input type> alone used to instantly kill IE.

This is what happens when you implement stuff by adding hack on top of a hack (CSS on top of "magic" HTML elements) instead of refactoring old crap and using proper approach (all display handled by CSS only).

I really think a lot of nontechnical users couldn't care less about new features or redesigned interfaces -- what they've got works, and they don't want it messed with.

Problem is that Microsoft wants to be all things to all people. They think all those people who've switched to Firefox will switch back by giving them a spangly new interface (and throw standards advocates a bone too). They panic about it, get all worried that losing IE usage share means losing their monopoly, the result is IE7.

Their plan is:

1. Make early adopters switch back to IE by giving them a spangly interface and 'tabs'
2. Force everyone else to upgrade, they're too stupid to have a choice anyway
3. ...
4. Profit!

What they should do is provide a small, very quick, ultra-standards compliant browser everyone can use. Average people will just use what they're given, they don't need anything more. Whilst people who want tabs, extensions, skinning and all that jazz can use Firefox, Opera, Konqueror etc. Microsoft would gain much more credibility by rewriting the browser engine, rather than shoehorning a few fixes into a product that is fundamentally flawed.

That won't happen though, because this is Microsoft. Nothing less than 100% usage share for IE is good enough in their eyes, and that is their biggest mistake.

Why would they when other people are already doing that

The CSS/rendering engine they've been using since IE4 is still around. They keep patching it with every release to try and bring it up to spec. However the underlying reason for all the layout bugs still remain.

It's called hasLayout and it's created many problems over the years. It's still there in IE7 and there are new bugs relating to hasLayout in IE7 as demonstrated here.

While many little rendering bugs have been fixed, the IE rendering model is still fundamentally broken: http://www.satzansatz.de/cssd/onhavinglayout.html

On the other hand it's usually more trouble to get things looking right in IE6 than to get things looking right in even old versions of Firefox and Opera.

True, styling for IE6 is a pain. However, since reading "On Having Layout" I've been having a noticeably easier time. It's a bit longer but it's definately worth the read. I've been able to cut down on crazy browser hacks significantly since learning about the height: 1% trick.

Oh, and getting IE 5.5 compatibility is basically just styling for IE6 with a few added box model hacks, so I usually spend the extra 5 minutes it takes at the end to get it done. Makes your major customer -- whose corporate IT infrastructure still specifies IE5.5 as a standard -- happy, too. Yes, they still exist.

The W3C publishes their specs; Microsoft does not. If they did [emphasis mine], I'm sure the Mozilla folks would be more than happy to implement it. As it stands, they're forced to try and emulate some of IE's bugs and quirks in order to render poorly-written, IE-only pages correctly.

But as I pointed out earlier in the discussion, they generally haven't done this.

He said that if Microsoft published specifications for MS-HTML, MS-CSS, etc, Mozilla might do something about it. Microsoft leaves a lot of things undocumented, so pointing out that Mozilla hasn't been forthcoming with support for these things doesn't contradict what he said.

Historically, their attitude has been that they would support only the "official" (i.e., W3C and such) specs, and would not implement any concessions to IE compatibility.

This is not the case. Their main focus is obviously on standards, and if the standard way of doing something conflicts with the Microsoft way of doing something, they tend to pick the standard way. But Mozilla have implemented plenty of stuff in the name of compatibility with Internet Explorer. Off the top of my head, there's document.all, favicons, two quirks modes and XMLHttpRequest. I'm sure there's more.

For all the bitching some people have been doing in this discussion about MS not documenting anything, they've also been bitching about IE6 has been standing still for years. It's not like there's a moving target to emulate, and the main differences are well enough known that pro web developers use them on auto-pilot these days!

There's a difference between web developers being able to work around issues and browser developers being able to correctly emulate issues. Compare, for example Microsoft's documentation for hasLayout, and its reverse-engineered description. This one facet of rendering has huge implications on layout, yet it remained an undocumented mystery for five years and still hasn't been totally cracked. Or look at Hixie's description of the way Internet Explorer comes with a DOM tree that isn't actually a tree. Or look at Hyatt's description of the "residual style" problem.

Mozilla and other browser developers already spend plenty of time reverse-engineering Internet Explorer. Are you really criticising them for choosing to implement some standards stuff too rather than spending 100% of their time on reverse-engineering Internet Explorer's crazy behaviour?

You link to the fact that Mozilla renders one character incorrectly, while ignoring things like the fact that MSIE fails to render large chunks of standard compliant pages at all. They just vanish, poof. If these were the only two bugs, I suspect you'd say that they were "equally standards compliant" wouldn't you? After all, they only have one bug each, right?

Bah I say.

--MarkusQ

Random borders that have no reason to be there.

Bugs that affect hover sensitivity on css layers

Min and max width settings ignored

and the dreaded 'hasLayout' property which gets an excellent write up here.
IE. Just say no