(September 24, 2008 at 11:16 pm)user-56 Wrote: @adrian: Microsoft is in fact a member of the W3C. I'm also unaware of what standards it just "made up". The reason IE is behind the other browsers (in both standards compliance and security) is actually because, after bundling IE4 with Windows 98 to shove Netscape (which was then the dominant browser) out of the market (thus making it pretty much universal) Microsoft just decided that there was no need for improvement because they were already "the best". It came back to bite them in the butt pretty hard; Firefox is pretty much a reincarnation of Netscape.Being a member of the W3C proves nothing. Microsoft are members of many groups simply because they are the dominant computer company on the planet. The W3C have consistently upgraded HTML to XHTML, and have introduced standard CSS, both of which Microsoft have failed to implement properly. I.E 6 (the most commonly used browser still) did not support basic XHTML, and the CSS required "hacks" that are still prevalent in I.E 7. I.E 8 is the first MS browser that could actually comply with a large majority of the standardizations. However, they are still well behind browsers that started their engines based on W3C specs, like Firefox and Opera.
Oh, and to all those who are now using Firefox over I.E, but find some sites that do not work, try this extension:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1419
It means you can open a new tab using IE's rendering engine.