One of the reasons there are so many incompatibilities between browsers in every era is that the web is not built out of a small set of primitives: everyone tha

One of the reasons there are so many incompatibilities between browsers in every era is that the web is not built out of a small set of primitives: everyone that wants to provide a web interface must implement the whole set of WWW standards (html, scripting, css, etc), which is very difficult and error prone. If there was only a handful of primitives to implement, and everything else was built on it, then it would be much easier to stay compatible. This is the kind of situation that has led to IE6 dominating the web, then motivating Google to create a browser, take the market and then Microsoft finally dropping their web engine and taking up Chromium.