For this particular complaint / praise session, I’m going to point out one among many reasons Internet Explorer is feeble and proprietary beyond even the Dionysian extents of Safari.

Case in point: here is a lovely design by “ravisarma”, it is a theme for the WordPress content management system:

IE Can't do this :(

It looks like this in Firefox, Opera, Google’s Chrome, and…yes!  Even Safari!  But not in Internet Explorer Look at this sad example in a browser that does not keep up with modern times:

With IE :(

In the first picture we see pleasant rounded corners. They invite your eye to touch them. In the Internet Explorer pic we see the same hard corners that have been around since 1995. Hard corners are fine until you want “simple” rounded corners. The movement right now is for a simple appearance and enhanced functionality, which is accomplished sometimes elegantly, sometimes complexly, sometimes by brute force :) Now have a look at this.

This describes a box that would be full of content.  The corners of the box could be described like this:

-moz-border-radius: 10px 10px 10px 10px;

Basically we have a box with rounded corners.  Simple enough.  Above we just described to the browser how to draw those corners.  That is pretty much all that is needed aside from dimension, placement, and colors.  No images are required to eat up precious download speeds.

In Internet Explorer you must have at least three boxes to describe the same area described above.  One for the top area that contains a picture with rounded corners.  One for the actual content.  One for the bottom that also contains an image with rounded corners.  Yuck.  If you wanted to save some download time you could divide it up into seven boxes and use separate images for each of the four corners.

Dear Microsoft – I love Windows.  But why do we have to do all of this just for your browser?