Possibly the most annoying thing with developing a web page is having to deal with the varying (especially the poor) support for CSS by various browsers. The most annoying was at one time Netscape in their circa version 4.7 days. I've decided to ignore the possibily that someone out there is using Netscape 4--if they're still using a browser that old, they probably have a terrible monitor as well, in which case my page style is likely irrelevant; I'll just have Netscape 4 ignore the style sheet and render the raw HTML instead--but now the annoying browser is (and has been for a while actually) Internet Explorer. I've had web-developer friends of mine say rather recently that they hate having to deal with Mozilla/Firefox/Netscape and that their site looks fine in IE, implying that it's Mozilla/Firefox/Netscape's fault for not rendering their page as they intended. The truth, however, is that Mozilla (in general... of course there are problems with how Mozilla renders pages as well, but at least they are constantly improving) complies to W3C standards better than IE, and doesn't allow some of the sloppy HTML that IE allows.

The most annoying thing to me is that IE doesn't support hovering over non-link elements. In recent versions of Mozilla/Firefox, you can use CSS to create fast, light-weight menus that JavaScript was previously used to create (see Eric Meyer's how-to at css/edge). I'm not much for flair on a web page, but creating useful menus can be very beneficial and help clean up a page. Using JavaScript has its obvious downfalls, such as code maintenance and the ability for users to disable JavaScript. The sad truth is that most people (unwittingly I presume, for there is no other reason I can think of) use IE instead of the much better Mozilla and other Gecko derivations. This means we have to either not use some of the CSS tools available or create alternate style sheets for various browsers (such as what I did on my other blog, which has pure-CSS menus if you use a recent version of Mozilla or Firefox, and the entire layout is pure CSS (no tables)). If IE would just improve their support of CSS standards, it would make web development much easier for many people. Luckily most of my web development is for internal Sun Microsystems sites, so I don't have to worry about how IE renders the page.

However, I suppose I have a secret desire for IE to not improve because the longer they sit idle, the further ahead Mozilla will get.