The world has finally accepted the fact that IE is a total piece of s***.

I wish these guys all the success in the world. You might sneer at this attempt, but Zeldman and his consortium pulled a similar maneuver some years back to strongarm the big browser developers in to properly supporting CSS, and it was something of a success.

But, I digress: there was some recent noise about M$ working on IE 8. I honestly don't know why they bother. As much as every web developer on Earth remembers that scary period where IE was pretty much the only game in town (and had to be coded for regardless of how bad the CSS support was), M$ failed to totally monopolize the web thanks to the efforts of the Mozilla Foundation and their excellent Firefox browser.

This being the case, why they are pouring money in to another IE release simply confounds me. Why not just install Firefox by default in Windows and call it quits? What the hell is the revenue stream for IE anyway? Does it follow what you are doing online and feed the info back to the Mother$hip? Is there that much ad revenue generated through MSN by the default home page in IE being set to it? Do they really want to help all the virus developers install their warez that badly? I just don't get it.

And while I'm at it, I'll take the same shot at Apple. I love Safari, but WTF - let's just all accept Firefox/Camino and the Gecko engine as the default renderer for the Internet and get it over with. At least that way all the HTML and JavaScript will run flawlessly in one environment. Think about the positive impact to the global economy when millions of web developers worldwide can stop wasting time trying to get every browser to agree on which pixels should be rendered where.

That, or just use Flex and let Adobe eat everybody's lunch with Flash (yeah, that's really going to happen :) ).