Majority != Standard

Internet Explorer has according to NetApplications got 77.35% of the browser market. W3Schools puts the same number at 57% of the market, so I think it's safe to assume the actual number is somewhere in between. What we have to keep in mind is that the statistics for this is collected from websites by the means of included images, scripts, etc. and each number will reflect the relevant percentages for the collecting site's user base. W3Schools is a website with lots of information and reference on the current web standards. That is, the official standards.

Being a web developer in these days more or less sucks to be honest. And most of this suckyness can be blamed on Internet Explorer.

Microsoft has always taken its own path, and it's sad to say, but they seem to be avoiding open standards no matter what. They went to ECMA and ISO with their OOXML format and bribed companies in order to decapitate the Open Document standard. In the OOXML standard, they didn't decide to use any of the existing standards for vector graphics, such as SVG, but instead invented not only one but two proprietary formats for the same purpose.

Today, if you are building a website, it's not uncommon to have to build two versions of it. Or rather, to use tweaks and non-standard methods for making it compatible with Internet Explorer. First, you build it according to all the standards. Then, test it out in FireFox and Opera. Your 100% standards compliant code will work to 99.9%. Then, you fire up Internet Explorer and have a look at the same website, and from there on it's tweaking time. Correcting bad measurements, fixing images, and sometimes just rewriting parts of the page to work. That is in Internet Explorer 6.0. Then you realize that Internet Explorer 7.0 is doing things in its own non-standard way. There are some minor hoorays, but in the end you probably have to put in another stylesheet just for IE7.

Just a simple thing as the PNG image format that was introduced around 1997 if I remember correctly is still not handled properly by Internet Explorer 7. The format was intended to take the best parts from the JPG format, which supported around 16.7 million colors, and the GIF format which supported transparency. FireFox handles it perfectly. The same goes for Opera. Internet Explorer 6.0 didn't support the transparency, and furthermore managed to misintepret the simple section of the PNG format specifications relating to gamma correction, thus rendering the colors in the picture wrong. Internet Explorer 7 has not fixed this problem, but on the upside it supports transparency.

So, designing compatible websites is just painful, and I just wish that everyone would simply drop the Internet Explorer tweaking. Make the sites look proper in the browsers that are proper and follows the standards. If it doesn't work in Internet Explorer, so what. At least it is built according to standards, and work in a majority of the browsers, although not in the browser with the apparent majority.

Get FireFox! Besides standards compliance, you also get stability and improved security.