Paul Thurrott has posted an article on Windows IT Pro site on what to expect (or rather not to expect) from an upcoming new release of Redmonmd browsing experence. If you have not read this yet (linked from many places around the web and a plethora of blogs), then in a nutshell — don’t expect too much. Looks like MSFT team has spent all this time for naught. Only “most important” parts of CSS2, “highest requested features” and “most critical bugs” will be fixed.
While noone in his sane mind should feel very much surprised by this, it is interesting to see some of the comments posted to the article. Especially seeing statements of a sort like “give them some slack — they’re trying.” They aren’t trying. Having all the financial strength of MSFT, the crew of developers and a number of people in W3C and other standards groups and still not being able to deliver does not constitute trying.
Day in and day out when I run onto websites that can’t display properly in Firefox or Safari I curse under my breath, but go on — hoping that the day will finally come when this won’t be a status quo anymore. Looks like the time has indeed come to take a morew active stance, though. Enough bullshit.
Emotions aside, one does not need to be a psychic to figure that one of the at least plausible reasons why MSFT might go this way is to ensure a hold on Web dominance of IE. What good is it if it were to pass Acid2? It’ll be the point when IE becomes fully replaceable by any other of the browsers. It is not now — there are all those “nicely” coded web sites that rely on this or that particular feature (or bug) in IE.
So, I am all with Paul. Boycott it!