Opera Web Browser Corporation CTO Hakon Wium Lie recently published an open letter to Microsoft to encourage them to make their IE browser standards compliant. Opera has as well filed a complaint with the European Commission to force Microsoft to respect and use open Web standards in the design of its IE browser.
Håkon Lie is a respected authority in these matters not only as CTO of Opera, but also from his experience at CERN and W3C designing and contributing the standards the Web is based upon. In his open letter, Mr. Lie points out that despite Microsoft's considerable resources and talent, as well as for all the promises made on the subject, it still fails to implement open web standards. Mr. Lie points as an example how the Acid2 standard has not been implemented in IE, the web's most popular browser.
It is true what Håkon Lie says, that while the browser is the most important internet application for everyone who uses the Web, the task of delivering new media to all the users of the web is confounded by problems of making software compatible across various browsers; when the feature sets of browsers do not adhere to open Web standards, debugging becomes a costly and time consuming process.
Perhaps Microsoft's neglect for open standards is the cause of the continued and noticeable diminishing of IE's share of the browser market. As the Web continues to grow in popularity, Web users become more savvy and turn to different applications for browsing the Web, namely Firefox, Opera, Netscape, and Safari. These browser alternatives are seen as providing a better user experience than IE in terms of performance, features, extendability, and security.