MSN.com is one. Not validating means your page has errors. If you allow errors, you are letting the browser guess what you are trying to do. If browsers are guessing, then you are counting on all browsers to guess the same way. Then, when a new version comes out, can you be assured this guessing won't change? Relying on errors to produce your page is not the best way to do things.
A) that's b/c FF3 is B) plus I have yet to have it crash once since I have been using the Beta, that includes 2,3, and now 4. Ask me how many times I've had IE crash on me in the past week no less than 7!
I use Microsoft Windows Vista, and I can really say that IE7 is incredibly fast - and I hope Microsoft do the same inception with IE8. I tried IE8 on my Windows XP desktop, and is quite slow, but again vastly improved from how bad they use to be with IE6 and below, but crashed quite frequently. I am going to try IE8 on this Vista laptop, and see if it performs any better, and check the memory usages. I have tried FF3 and I can easily use it already, it hasn't crashed once, and is very fast (and I love the new features with it, and a few modifications to the design structure itself). The only problem was many add-ons weren't compatible with FF3 and so I had to uninstall it. The usual sites I visit were rendered quite nicely in both FF3 and IE8, so no problems there. With IE8 new META tag they're introducing, it'll be a treat to see how Websites (namely compliant Websites) are rendered, and see if Microsoft have really made improvement. FF3 should probably become compliant later on when theres the final releases, but its great to see IE8 passing the acid2 test.
Though Internet Explorer has improved greatly and enclosed it does things that FireFox does not do, I still it is difficult to me to return to, Internet Explorer, only I use it for open the mail of the Messenger.
I agree 100% with your post. But let me ask you a question. Tell me, most of the pages you visit on the net are not HTML and CSS verified. I have checked most of the major ones I visit and except for the ones like Google, Microsoft ect they all have "crutches" in them.
True, very few pages on the web are HTML and CSS compliant. All my pages are compliant, yet I still have to add some "special" code for IE. I'm sure that it will be fixed gradually, now that Microsoft has stopped trying to force its proprietary standards on everyone and has agreed to cooperate (well, for HTML and CSS, anyway; it still doesn't want to cooperate with document standards). I guess that much of the anti-Microsoft rant comes from frustration with its previous failure to cooperate.
Lets look at something. Don't blame Microsoft, it happens when every single company gets big. They don't listen to developers. Same thing has happened to Apple in the MP3 player world. Google in the web world and CISCO in the industrial world.
The idea of the meta taag has been dropped. It only passed an internal, modified version of the test; not the online test, but I have not tried the beta with the online test (the only one that counts). I have read the final version will not pass but don't know why.
Many developers learned how to create web pages when the dust settled between Microsoft and Netscape. In addition, automatic code generators, like Dreamweaver, knew they could get away with bad markup because browsers are required to attempt to make sense of bad markup. This led to sloppiness/laziness by developers who only cared if their page worked in IE. IE, however, is document-centric to Microsoft products, and was never created to be a web worldly browser. (It has its roots in Windows Explorer for the desktop). As the web has expanded and things get more complicated, interfacing between different platforms, databases, user interfaces, etc., made it necessary to find one standard method to exchange data. People found that it does matter that we need to speak the same language and everything must follow one true method. I don't want to have to write my software more than one way for different companies, vendors and browsers. This is where Microsoft has gotten itself into trouble. I want mySQL data to be sent via SOAP to an IBM customer (who runs IBM software, not Microsoft) in India. I use XML with XHTML. (But IE doesn't handle XHTML.) iow, all this stuff has to work together in a standard reliable way. You can't have errors in the code and "forgiving" browsers when handling financial data traveling around the world.
No no no, Safari rocks Disclaimer: I'm using IE 7 and have no problems, waiting for the final version of IE 8
Opera... Opera? What the **** is Opera? Sorry, I don't want to sound mean, but really. If I run with the flow, I will soon find myself correcting my design for Uncle Bateman from Texas, who is for whatever reason using Flock, SeaMonkey or Konqueror. Oh, well. When I work on a sophisticated page I always check if it is valid. I recently checked a WordPress theme which I made with my buddy. It is completely valid for its doctype. I have tried several validators. Nevertheless I had to make mends to eliminate cracks and funny artefacts from FF. I am not saying I cannot design pages that look good in both IE and FF. I can. It's just I am spending extra time to work for FF and if there was no FF (or as I like to say: WHEN there will be no FF) I could spend more time on promoting. More promoting means more money. That's how FF prevents me from making extra dosh