If you've ever coded a website, you'll be aware of the horrors of Internet Explorer 6. In short, it didn't fully follow the CSS version 2 standard, necessitating a slew of browser-specific workarounds. So although HTML and CSS are ratified industry standards, the word "standard" isn't apparently in the Redmond lexicon.

And now they're doing it again.

The folks at CSS3 Wizardry have put the latest beta of IE9 to the test and discovered that...

...Microsoft has finally implemented the CSS3 selectors that were implemented by other browsers back in, what? 2003? Because Microsoft has updated IE to support CSS3 selectors and rounded corners, they want us to believe that somehow IE9 magically supports the whole slew of CSS3 visual styling. I’m afraid it doesn’t. As a matter of fact, IE9′s support for CSS3 visual styling is so poor that the results are shocking. Firefox, Chrome and Safari can render graphically rich interfaces using the sophisticated features of CSS3. IE9 does, well, rounded corners. That’s why I’m saying: IE9 is the IE6 of CSS3. Repeat that a few times until it sinks in because if you do Web development, you’re going to have to deal with it.

(More details here along with a visual comparison.)

How is it that free browsers can manage to follow standards -- and do so in a timely fashion -- while the browser you pay for (with every copy of Windows), can't?

With modern browsers like Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera you can create amazing interfaces using advanced features of HTML5 and CSS3. With IE9 you can keep making Websites like you did, um, back in 1995: lots of pieces of images chopped up and stuck all over the place like a jigsaw puzzle. Yay! Microsoft has done their best to inhibit adoption of Web standards. Your HTML5/CSS3 Websites and Web apps will look great everywhere except you know where. At least with earlier versions of IE there were CSS hacks to make it display like other browsers. There is no way to make IE9 display CSS3 like other browsers. IE9 is that bad.

And a last word from CSS3 Wizardry:

Now you know why Internet Explorer’s E is blue: it represents how IE suffocates and strangles Web innovation.