I'm reading all these comments criticising MS for it's lack of support for standards and everyone seems to forget that before IE became prevalent it was even harder to make a web applications work consistently on multiple browsers. Not only would Netscape come out with proprietary tags between versions, but they would also break HTML rendering and JavaScript support from one version to another. With Netscape version 4.x it got so bad that IE 4 was a godsend.
Granted the way that IE grabbed marketshare was unfair; but at least with 90% plus marketshare web developers had as standard a platform as you could get in the late 90's. When CSS started to make it to the mainstream IE was doing a very good job of supporting what most people needed at the time. Today we know that that support was lacking, but who really needed to care with "other" browsers being on the fringe.
Skip to present day, and HTML rendering is the least of MS's problems with IE. Making developer's lives easier is a nice bonus, but not at all essential for them. Developers always have a knack for getting around limitations and being creative to get things to work. We like to bitch and complain, but in the end we get the job done. Contrast this with high profile issues such as security and you can see where MS's priorities are going to be.
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I'm reading all these comments criticising MS for it's lack of support for standards and everyone seems to forget that before IE became prevalent it was even harder to make a web applications work consistently on multiple browsers. Not only would Netscape come out with proprietary tags between versions, but they would also break HTML rendering and JavaScript support from one version to another. With Netscape version 4.x it got so bad that IE 4 was a godsend.
Granted the way that IE grabbed marketshare was unfair; but at least with 90% plus marketshare web developers had as standard a platform as you could get in the late 90's. When CSS started to make it to the mainstream IE was doing a very good job of supporting what most people needed at the time. Today we know that that support was lacking, but who really needed to care with "other" browsers being on the fringe.
Skip to present day, and HTML rendering is the least of MS's problems with IE. Making developer's lives easier is a nice bonus, but not at all essential for them. Developers always have a knack for getting around limitations and being creative to get things to work. We like to bitch and complain, but in the end we get the job done. Contrast this with high profile issues such as security and you can see where MS's priorities are going to be.