Another thing that has ticked me off about IE is that they don’t try to support standards until they have become official. In that link above they allude to not giving a damn about adding CSS 3 support for IE7, because it’s not actually a standard yet. It’s just in development.

This was largely the case when IE6 came out. It supported CSS1, but only a couple of CSS2 commands (and not properly, at that). This meant that by the time CSS2 was standard, IE was completely unprepared for it, and after all this time we’re still waiting for them to catch up. Meanwhile, Mozilla makes sure that it implements what standards it can quickly, so that when the standards become official, they already have a browser that is capable of rendering pages with it.

The IE development team seems to think that playing catch-up is impressive enough, when it’s not.

I hope that Chris is wrong about IE ensuring that it is backwards compatible with its buggered brethren since it will ensure that I can continue to look forwards to “Best Viewed With IE Since We Can’t Be Arsed To Make It Compatible With Other Browsers” messages and other annoyances…

As for IE7, the MS developers have stated on their IE Blog that IE7 will feature much better CSS support, but it will still maintain backwards compatibility so it doesn’t break older sites. What this means is that they’re still not going to be a generally W3C-compliant browser, because they screwed everyone over too hard with previous versions of IE, and they can’t just throw all the poorly skilled “web developers” into the deep end with a fully compliant browser.

As for funtionality, their tabbed browsing implementation is set to be, err, interesting. To maintain compatibility, speed, and stability, extra toolbar addons will now have their own instance in each tab you have open. If you want to see what I mean, this place has some projected screenshots of what it will probably look like. Not pretty at all, and I for one value my screen real estate very highly. Good thing I won’t use extra toolbars. Better thing - I won’t use IE.

If 90% of the web used IE7 instead of IE6, that would be an improvement, but at least for the first 18 months or so, it’s going to be a big pain having to design for compliant browsers (Safari, Firefox, and Opera) as well as both IE7 and IE6, which I dare say will have some different issues between them. Hopefully IE7’s better CSS support will make this issue a minimal one though, and it’ll still jsut be IE6 that’s the pain.