More on (moronic?) IE

Mike responded to my post last night about the wonderful world of IE. We pretty much agree, but I expected that. The whole situation has me worried though. We're in a Catch-22 here. Developers won't push the limits of what non-IE browsers have to offer (CSS2 and better, real XHTML, etc.) until a significant number of users are using those browsers. And as long as "everything seems to work ok" those users won't leave IE. It's a standoff. Solution? I'm with Mike - the rest of the browser world has to work their asses off while Microsoft lets IE sit and rot.

I can't entirely agree with Mike that Safari is super-important to Apple as a company. But it is important to the Apple community and the web at large. It's a good product from what I've seen of it, but we have Mozilla on the Mac too, and a few others. I gotta say I am somewhat glad that MS dropped MacIE, even though it was superior to WinIE - it really opened the floodgates for browsers on the platform, and everyone's pretty much on equal footing. Those browsers are truly competing with one another, and I wouldn't be surprised to see that competition result in big benefits for the non-Apple crowd - Safari's KHTML code is GPL and will get back into KDE and Konqueror, Mozilla will of course see benefits of any changes on all platforms it runs on. I'd really like to see the Apple community pushing the advancement of the web now. And I think it's possible. The tools are in their hands, and the opportunity is here.

I'm still trying to figure out what this guy is thinking. What really makes IE better? The security holes? How important is designMode (which Mozilla may have a version of, I'm not sure), really?

By a stroke of luck, Eric Meyer, CSS guru, also weighed in on the subject this weekend. Not much I can add to what he wrote. He even got the Eolas thing in, which I still don't fully understand as I haven't been tracking it.