CSS Support Could Be IE's Weakest Link

Found on Microsoft Watch on Wednesday, 16 March 2005
Browse Software

Microsoft will be doing a lot to make developers and customers happy with its pending Internet Explorer release, if partner sources with inside information on the IE 7.0 browser are right.

The company will continue to drag its feet by refusing to provide full support for the CSS2 (Cascading Style Sheets Level 2) W3C (Worldwide Web Consortium) standard, Microsoft partners say.

Sources claiming familiarity with Microsoft's IE 7.0 plans said the company will add some additional CSS2 support to its new standalone browser.

But Microsoft isn't planning to go the whole way and make IE 7.0 fully CSS2 compliant, sources said.

One partner said that Microsoft considers CSS2 to be a "flawed" standard and that the company is waiting for a later point release, such as CSS2.1 or CSS3, before throwing its complete support behind it.

CSS2 cannot be more flawed than MS products. Other browsers support CSS2 and don't complain. Plus, it should be easy for MS to upgrade to CSS2.1 or CSS3 later along with the normal bugfixes. Another interesting point would be the size of IE7. IE5.5 (incl. SP2) was a 84MB download; compared to others, eg FireFox with not even 5MB, this is quite a lot. But since I won't touch XP, and don't have W2k3, it doesn't really affect me now.