How about an inline-block bounty for Mozilla developers? Perhaps what it will take to get it working is cold, hard cash. Should we post a site and take up a collection? I would throw a few bills into the pot for that one.

We can do this now with 5 thru 6 thanks to the efforts of some community members. If IE 7 insists on crowding out all previous versions, however, testing becomes much harder. The problem is, I can also see a very good security-based argument for not allowing older versions to run.

But why would they do that? If a page “breaks” in everything but IE because it’s coded using standards, it looks bad on the designer’s part to everyone but other designers. I hope I’m wrong, but I don’t see this as a being a negative in M$’s eyes.

-adam

In my experience most neither know nor care about security; those that do know (because they’ve had to take their PCs back to the shop/call in “a guy who advertises in the newsagent’s window”) still don’t care. They carry on without virus/malware/spyware protection. The best that most of them can manage is that they install whatever AV the shop/the guy sold them then they forget about it; updates? what are they?.

If Firefox, Opera and others can get most of css to work why the hell can”t Microsoft (the RICHEST, LARGEST company in the WORLD).

1. Microsoft is not the biggest corporation in the world, and is arguably not the richest.

2. Despite being offered for free, Internet Explorer is not (and never was) an altruistic endeavor. Internet Explorer is part of the Windows platform, and serves as a base for Microsoft technologies.

3. Firefox, Opera, and Safari operate on different business models than IE.

4. Designing and writing a fully CSS2.1-compliant browser is an extremely complicated and expensive project (and may be impossible, since no standard that complex is without contradiction and ambiguity), even if restricted to perfectly-formed XHTML.

5. The only people who even notice CSS errors are web developers. Normal users can’t tell the difference between a webpage that looks bad in IE because of a box model error and a webpage that was designed for IE and so looks bad in Firefox.

6. Microsoft and the IE Team have plenty of other things to be doing right now. (Longhorn and IE Security, respectively)

There”s NO excuse

I just thought of six, off the top of my head. Want me to try for seven?

Microsoft is just a bunch of money hungry, greedy slackers.

…as opposed to the feature-hungry, greedy slackers like us, who whine in blog comments?

This isn’t really the place for moral outrage…

Point 1 (and 6) is my main wish too.

Out of curiousity, what does microsoft get from maintaining it”s own rendering engine?

An embedded platform for ActiveX, .NET Controls, and Xaml, which is basically the same thing they get for maintaining a browser at all.

I think the past few years have proven that an enormous amount of ill-will can be generated from a poorly implemented one.

They’re Microsoft; the ill-will is hardly going to go away just because they implement some 5 year old standards. In fact, other than a couple of whiny web developers like us (who even now don’t dare drop IE support in any major project), nobody gives two craps if IE meets W3C standards.

The general public does care, however, that IE6 is wide open to malware attacks even after SP2.

Also, I don”t understand this question I”m supposed to answer “What color is an orange?” I gave the correct answer (living next to an orange grove) and I was not able to submit.

The question should be changed to “What color is an American orange after it is chemically treated and coated with polymer resin?”

Since the color “orange” is defined as “the color that oranges are” (just like “violet” and “periwinkle” are the colors violets and periwinkles are, respectively), oranges are orange, no matter what color they are .

Apple piggy-backed on KHTML…why wouldn’t Microsoft piggy-back on Gecko?

Please, oh please.

Dirtiest plant I ever worked at…