I have a strange observation that in any web application designing, why we need to put a huge amount of efforts just to make them work in all the browsers. I mean probably the efforts to development or designing the things are sometimes equal to just test and make it work in every browser.Even we have well stated standards define which are accepted globally (may be W3C standards ? I am not sure).
Please don’t miss understand the question as I know that we can definitely reduce these efforts to a certain level but still a considerable bunch is always needed to work with.
So why all the browsers or kind of softwares are not following the set of standards ? I am taking JavaScripts(i.e events, properties, syntax etc) CSS and HTML also into consideration.
Please help if you know the way and correct me if I am wrong…
A long time ago, there were basically just two browsers: Internet Explorer and Netscape. Microsoft did not like Netscape and had a huge market share so they added whatever they wanted/considered useful without caring about it being standardized or not – and netscape did not add every non-standard Microsoft feature, too. So IE contains lots of proprietary stuff that is not standardized.
Besides that, IE6 was not actively maintaned (besides security fixes) for a very long time. All bugs present there were never fixed – and even in IE7 there are some bugs that require hacks or at least additional efforts to make things look like in other browsers.