Internet Explorer: Always One Step Behind

You probably have seen that Microsoft recently started a campaign to promote IE8. Microsoft is being very aggressive with this campaign and is raising a lot of controversy. One of the campaign, Get the facts, compares IE8 with two other popular browsers: Firefox 3.0 and Google Chrome (will anyone ever consider Opera as a major browser?). As this is a comparison chart made by Microsoft, IE8 is either better or equal to the other browsers in all the comparison points (and those points include Web Standards and Customizability). Of course, they (have to) explain why they think their browser is at least as good as the others for every point.

One Step Behind

Here’s what they say about Web Standards:

Firefox and Chrome have more support for emerging standards like HTML5 and CSS3, but Internet Explorer 8 invested heavily in having world-class, consistent support for the entire CSS2.1 specification.

Yep, IE8 is better at supporting something that exists since 2005. While good support for CSS 2.1 is a very good point, IE8 just can’t follow the rest of the pack. That’s right, IE8 scores far less on the Acid 3 test than the other browsers.

That’s the problem with Microsoft, it has trouble getting ahead of the competition and keeps playing catch-up. Microsoft can’t create a proper rendering engine, so why not adopt WebKit and stop wasting everyone’s money on supporting widely adopted inferior browsers.