IE7 and CSS… a dead horse?

So the initial reports are popping up around the net. Internet Explorer 7 is only 54% compatible with the CSS 2.1 standard, vs. firefox’s 93% and Opera 9’s 96% (statistical analysis based on this source). This jives with my initial experiences with the beta release, although the Microsoft blog claims quite a few bug fixes on the official release of version 7. They also admit, however, that it will fail the Acid2 browser-compliance test. So what’s the point in a new browser?

Basically, the argument goes that Microsoft has pushed it’s proprietary code so far for so long that drastic changes to it’s rendering code would break half the web. So it’s a terrible, terrible self-fulfilling prophecy. While we as designers are all making sites in Firefox and then spending hours making them work in Explorer, Explorer is making it harder and harder to work with, so that we have to keep working harder and pushing our sites farther away from the standards. Some sites have so many hacks in place for IE that putting out a standards compliant browser in which the hacks still worked would be disastrous. However, fixing the CSS core to properly recognize a well formed CSS file would render the hacks obsolete and IE would read the code the same way Firefox does, right? And ideally, render it the same way. The next generation of browser wars could have one less (major) variable.

So help send a message to Microsoft. Boycott IE. Get Firefox.