It's interesting to see how the milestones shift. I started out making websites in IE3 and NS3, and you were glad just to get some sort of basic navigation goin

It's interesting to see how the milestones shift. I started out making websites in IE3 and NS3, and you were glad just to get some sort of basic navigation going across browsers. It wasn't really web "design" back in those days. Then we had the IE4 / NS4 period, where you could actually do design in the browser, provided you built it twice, once for IE and once for NS. I wrote my first web app for NS4. It was a horrible browser, but it was good for its day. Then IE 6 happened, and it was the best browser by far and set a new baseline. It's funny to think back how at the time of its release IE 6 was an amazing browser, with fantastic standards support and stellar performance. The mozilla guys were playing catch-up churning out iterations of seamonkey, until firefox rose from seamonkey's morass, while all that time netscape users kept suffering on with NS 4. And inexorably IE 6 got old, and people like you were writing articles about how to bend back your code to support it. IE 8 was the first MS browser where I felt they really got their standards support right, and where you could build for it without major hackery. I was of course sorely mistaken, and now IE 8 is the old stuff that doesn't support the new hotness. It keeps shifting. One good thing that happened were auto-updating browsers. You don't see these articles anymore about supporting old versions of firefox. Microsoft has to get onto the auto-update bandwagon, and we can finally stop bending code backwards.