From Publish Online:

Opinion: There are different theories about why Microsoft is not implementing W3C standards, but the sad truth is that Web developers have to build sites with IE in mind. Microsoft is about to release IE 7.0, and if you've been hoping that this new release would solve your development problems, prepare to be disappointed.

Besides the obvious issues with an X.0 release of anything, word has it that the new browser won't fully support CSS2 standards.

So what else is new?

Since the beginning, those of us who make Web sites for a living have had to contend with various implementations of Web "standards." We've coded and canoodled and hacked and browser-detected in order to get our pages to render correctly in the plethora of browsers our users came to us with.

When Microsoft pretty much won the Browser War and Netscape faded into relative obscurity, it seemed that at least if we didn't have the best browser to deal with at least we had pretty much one browser to deal with.
Then along came Firefox (and Opera, to be fair), and all of a sudden we were back in the trenches again. To everyone's surprise it turned out that Firefox was a pretty nifty browser that adhered to the open standards and worked really, really well. Subsequently it caught on like wildfire, and Microsoft began to see their market share get eaten away again.

And now here comes IE 7.0, and we're again going to be faced with a dilemma. Considering Microsoft's overwhelming share of the market (and the fact that their browser is integrated into everything that goes on inside Windows), we're going to have to continue to deal with the limitations of a substandard browser. I use the word "substandard" advisedly, because IE7.0 is coming in below the standard that the WC3 has put forth.

This is just another example of Microsoft trying to dictate standards to the rest of the world, most of the time to their advantage. Do yourself a favor, keep using Firefox!

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