Originally posted by: nord1899
When you have 90+% of the market, you get to make the standards.
Anyways, both IE and Netscape 4.x were horrible at following the standards. Opera is probably the best at following it. Mozilla is pretty damn close.
Netscape 4.x and IE prior to 5 were pretty bad, but back in those browser war days no one really cared that much about the W3C and the competing companies were only interested in adding more proprietary features/tags/implementations to 'one-up' the other browser. Repeat after me: Proprietary features are a bad thing.
I actually find Opera to be pretty iffy still (even with its version 7 release), at least as far as CSS2 implementation goes. It's rather unpredictable at times in its implementation, and that's never a good thing with a browser. They claim to have gotten better with their DOM implementation but there are still a number of complaints out there about issues that haven't been resolved. They've come a long way though, and every release since version 5 has had substantial improvements.
The Gecko-based browsers are doing well. They still differ from IE and Opera in their implementation in some areas, but the implementations are still technically standards-compliant if you dig deep enough into what the W3C defines in some of its DTDs.
A lot of people have the misconception that IE is the 'most' standards-compliant. Although it is good in its implementation, it's also a very lax and forgiving browser (meaning it will attempt to spit out and render hemorrhaged code rather well). Which in this day and age of sloppy coders and users who export things from MS Word as HTML, isn't necessarily a bad thing heh.