If you ask yourself: why does Microsoft require its own browser?

Back when the internet took off Netscape was a clear winner by miles until Microsoft released its very own browser that brought a few features for Network administrators. Now that browsers are so secure in what they offer it seems Microsoft is hanging on with its fingertips. Google's Chrome has just been created these past months and they didn't need to re-invent the wheel. Taking the 3 major designs into their product all they needed to do was tie it all together with a nice framework and Googles own feature list. FireFox 3 has the most features available for its browser and I used to feel uncomfortable in Opera and Safari but these both have done a great job at creating browsers.

Why can't Microsoft just back down from the browser wars and let these other companies take over. Microsoft doesn't reep any reward for making a browser that is buggy and full of security holes but the thing I am so concerned with is that now Internet Explorer 8 seems to now have 3 standards for us web developers to work with including the actual recognised standards of the W3C. I am now stuck in limbo when writing scripts as the beta is buggy with all of the options (Quirks, Strict and Standards) so I am now finding it more difficult than ever to design something because I have to include a temporary fix for IE8 mistakes which may be fixed in 6 months - 1 year if its going to be fixed at all.

My website conforms to the W3C standards and I intend on keeping that way however I will loose vistors who browse on IE which is currently around 50% traffic. The other 50% comes from FireFox 3 which is great because I know the site will work with that. (There are a small number of people who visit my site with Opera and Safari and these seem to have very limited problems which I was able to fix through my scripts)

To make my point more clear, just look at Microsofts own websites through the IE8 Standards mode and you'll get the picture.

Back down Microsoft - you're just too late in the development of a standards browser!

If anyone else is suffering the same fate, I'd like to hear from you. Any suggestions on how I tackle the current limbo situation and how do I ask my users to switch browsers (I've already tried this and they are all under the impression that changing the browser is just not an option for various reasons for example: it would break windows!)

James

@James:

You do realize that IE8 passed the Acid2 standards test, right? You'll be more pleased w/ this edition of IE than the previous ones.

Steven