ChrisCodes.com

It's been suggested on many of the "IE Team Requests" blog entries, that have spawned over the past few months, that members of the IE Dev Team should download Mozilla Firefox and use it as their default browser to determine what to do with the next IE.

It's been echoed again and again that their browser needs properstandards support before new features, and an interesting angle to thatis the fact that all their sites (most every Microsoft site in general)look like sh*t in any browser other than Internet Explorer.
If you write sloppy code for a sloppy browser, it might look good in the sloppy browser, but run it in a real browser and see what you get. Slop.

I've been trying to read some of the M$ blogs that have popped up since the company launched it's blogging is cool campaign, but many of them look disturbingly awful in Firefox. Thankfully there's an RSS Reader extension called Sage so I don't have to actually look at their sites.

Itwas mentioned quite a few times, in comments on IE development, thatthey need to first validate their HTML. Design a page according tostandards using CSS and XHTML/HTML, then make all the fixes that wehave to make daily to get code to look right in IE. I think that is agreat starting point.
Many of the commentsregarding what they should do, beat "standards", "ProperPNG support" into the ground. It seems obvious what is wanted. Theyneed to stop blogging about it and write some freaking code already.With standards and accessibility taking the web by storm, they willneed to implement proper support, and fast.

Sorry for the rant,but I'm just sick of reading the same old "we're listening" crap. If they're listening, you'll fix the rendering bugs, add PNG support, andrelease an IE 6.something. IMHO, if they wait until 2007 to release IE7, their browser market share will be next to nothing, there's already been a slight decrease. It won't take much longer with word of mouth Firefox promotion, CERT recommendations, and daily vulnerabilities. I'm alreadydisplaying Anti-IE messages to IE users on my front page because I'msick of coding silly hacks for that browser.

Update: I just stumbled across Christian Machmeier's redsplash.de/blog/ entry which linked to this related 'BrowserWar II' article that gives a more in depth explantation of what I'm talking about here.