> At the time of their release IE4-IE6 have been the most standard-compliant browser At the time of their release, Opera was the most standards-compliant brows

> At the time of their release IE4-IE6 have been the most standard-compliant browser At the time of their release, Opera was the most standards-compliant browser. Beyond Opera, I'm not sure where Firebird, KHTML, etc. stood relative to IE4 specifically, but IE5.5/6.0 were well behind most contemporary browsers (lets exclude Netscape shall we; it was in crisis at the time and promptly discontinued). Opera, KHTML, Firefox and Webkit all passed Acid2 long before IE (IE8 was the first version). It's worth remembering that Acid1 was released in 1998; IE6 was released in 2001. So this wasn't a time before web standards and cross-browser compat: they were very much a part of the discourse at the time. A discourse MS largely refused to participate in. > Back then all browsers had unstandardized behavior, there was plenty of Netscape specific and IE specific hacks. Some of them were intended as EEE, some of them were result of weak standardization or mere technical limitations of their respective architectures. That is true, but it was largely due to bugs other browser makers were working on fixing. The EEE had a heavy influence on MS' motivations to get fixes out (whereas with Safari there isn't really any evidence of any EEE being present). A good counter-point is XMLHttpRequest. It was non-standard mainly because "AJAX" was a new-ish idea and standards didn't exist. There's good arguments that Microsoft's engagement with standardisation efforts of AJAX APIs was non-existent/actively-hostile, but at the end of the day the various APIs they implemented were pretty easy to detect (even the ActiveX variants), and generally could be targeted in a very cross-browser-compatible way. That was very much the exception to the rule though: the majority of pains were layout related, and involved not extra nor missing features, but rather features that were in common with other browsers that were deliberately implemented in a different way.