We just spent close to a full week just on getting IE6/7 working and displaying properly. It was a hell week. Things would break, you'd see errors that you have no idea where to even start fixing. You'd get frustrated, start cursing, start disliking everything and it would drain the energy right out of you. We spent hours and hours sometimes just blindly debugging by inserting all kinds of pieces of debug code (red lines, red backgrounds etc). We still have an IE7 bug that we have no way of fixing... we simply can't figure out how to fix it... and it's still pissing me off.

I always take advice from the standards people with a gigantic grain of salt. The reality is so much different from what people are presenting in their books and blogs. Many of these standards cheerleaders are designing simplistic pages and are ignoring IE almost completely. They show you screenshots of their designs in either FF or Safari on a Mac and assume this is how the World will see their designs (don't get me wrong, I do most of my browsing in Safari on a Mac as well). Some promote 'best practices' that are simply not suited for the real world and if you follow them, you will add weeks of work to your schedules.

Real world is so much different from what many pundits are telling you. If you plan on being successful and run a site that will be accessible to everyone, you have to deal with the reality. The reality is that about 35% of people are still using IE6 and 30% of people are using IE7. Reality is that most of the people upgrade browsers when they upgrade PCs. For a very long time MS required WGA for upgrade to IE7 so IE7 has been VERY slow in overcoming IE6. Another reality is that people from big enterprises (and also from the third World since many use last-successfully-cracked copy of WinXP which comes with IE6) still use IE6. Big enterprises are extremely slow to upgrade since many big-corp apps (like SAP) only work well with IE6. Enterprises also seem to dislike Vista so the hope that Vista upgrade with default IE7 will displace IE6 anytime soon is not based in reality.

In today's web development, you can push the limits of what a web browser can do very far, indeed. But, that's only the case if you use "modern" browsers like Firefox and Safari. However, you should realize that about 70% of your visitors will not have that browser and will have much worse web experience than what you intended them to have.

So if I can offer anyone some advice it's this: forget about FF/Safari/Opera etc. Concentrate on getting IE6/7 support right from the start. Don't wait. Don't put it off! You will have much tougher time trying to get it working properly later on than if you start supporting it from the start. We lost few weeks due to IE6/7 issues, at the very least, we missed our launch date because of it... don't make the same mistake. Supporting other browsers will be easy if you hammer out IE support early. Also, consider using IE6 as the default browser and see what your customers will see. Consider IE6 and its limitations and capabilities as the maximum to which you can push your innovation. If something doesn't work on IE, kill it for now. Throttle down your features so they work well with IE. You can offer them later on as premium features or nice extras. Finally, think about creating a process to deal with browser-specific issues. We created one and it's working well.

This is why I think that Acid2/3 will is a moot point. Browsers, on the internet, have an extremely long lifespan. IE6 is seven years old. It will be a browser that we will have to support until at least 2010 when Windows7 comes out and enterprises maybe decide to upgrade to it and skip over Vista. So the webdev innovation will be very slow for the next few years.

And finally, just to give you another dose or reality, more people use IE 5.X than Safari... and IE5.5 is about 9 years old.