I’m a web developer and unlike a lot of developers I have been a big fan and user of Internet Explorer 7 and now version 8.

However the standards compliance of Internet Explorer has always left something to be desired.  With the introduction of 7 a few years back the job of making sites work in Internet Explorer became a whole lot easier, but there is still a lot missing that really ought to be included, and thank goodness transparent PNG support was added.

Recently I switched to using Internet Explorer 8 RC as my main browser and whilst I like it there were a number of failings I found.  The first is the so-called standards compliance.  Well seeing as it doesn’t support lots of CSS 3 properties doesn’t really make it standards compliant, but I digress. Mainly my issues were with it’s rendering of pages that looked great in Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari but just didn’t work properly in Internet Explorer 8.  The sites weren’t even using browser sniffing to load different stylesheets.  Quite simply IE’s implementation of the standards was different to all the other major browsers.  Sorry Microsoft, must try harder!

Over the past month or so I’ve suddenly discovered that I now use Firefox 3 as my primary browser at work (I still use Safari 4 at home as I’m a mac person) and combine it with Firebug and it’s simply stunning.

What actually prompted me to write about this was a story I picked up upon this morning entitled ‘IE8 May Be End of the Line For Internet Explorer‘.  It discusses the fact that Microsoft might be considering using Webkit (the engine behind Chrome and Safari) for Internet Explorer. In an article on AppleInsider Steve Ballmer is quoted as saying

Addressing a developer conference in Sydney Australia, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said the idea of using WebKit as the rendering engine within its web browser was “interesting” and added “we may look at that.”

The fact that Ballmer would even mention using WebKit is very interesting indeed as you’d expect such a thing to be dismissed out of hand.  WebKit quite simply has the fastest and best rendering engine of any modern browser.  Just try Safari 4 on Windows or a Mac to try it out for yourself