Hurray! This is a good move, hopefully we can put this non standards business behind us in a few years time.

Really great.

That means that we are not going to listen to 10.000 webdesigners crying, but instead have 10.000.000 users screaming because of broken sites ;0)

I wouldn't have thought I'd see the day that MS would choose standards over default backwards compatibility.

I'm all for standards, but after you're entrenched, lack of backwards compatibility can really be a competitive disadvantage when end users just think "this doesn't look/work like it used to!"

Granted, we're talking a browser, so it's not as bad as, for instance, the Mac with its: "We're going to a new OS version again (System 7, OS 8, OS 9, OS X, ad naseum), and you software may not work with the new OS."

Ah, well. AmigaOS was the only true OS breakthrought there has been to date, anyway. ;)

[cue for Mac fanbois to moan]

Hey! I ran some large multi-node Mustang Wildcat! BBSes.
One of them was for Msft support.
Point being, I still feel like slapping anybody that was running Amiga back then, they created 40 character nightmares for us. ;-)

It seems to me that having to use the meta tag specifying browser version was a huge pain in the arse moving forward. If you specifically want to lock your pages to a particular browser then you can do so w/ the extra meta tag. Without the extra tag the browser assumes hey they want the most recent standards mode and renders to that. I think it is a huge win as only the misinformed web developer will be punished. Ultimately, that obviously means their users are punished but that is a cyclical pain cycle.

@wisemx Wildcat! BBSes... that takes me back. Were any of the nodes local to Nashville? (granted, I was using a PC by that time ;) )

Detroit area, I was in Calibration lab for Ford Motor Company. (Electronics, SVO, prototypes...)