This is a question that comes to my mind from time to time. Indeed, every time I have to fix any weird aesthetic bug in an old IE or Firefox browser. Why do I worry about my pages not being the same "to the pixel" in all browsers?
I know, I know. Not everybody does. But even those who don't worry too much spend hours in getting shadowed rounded corners in IE by using complicated DIV layouts and esotheric CSS hacks. How many hours of experts' effort have been wasted in finding out an ellegant solution to a problem for which an ellegant solution already exists? How many hours do web developers spend looking for these solutions in Google every day? And this weekend, while reading about the newcoming Microsoft IE 8, I see they have not put support for my CSS best friends yet: text-shadow, box-shadow and border-radius :'(
I admit Microsoft's position is very easy to understand. Why add support for box shadows and rounded corners through CSS if everybody is using images to achieve the effect and, more importantly, they are used to? It is the famous thermodynamics law of minimal effort (or it was energy??).
Fair enough, I understand it very well. But if this is the case, then we have to "force" them to work somehow, and this is what I will try to do.
You may think my position now is rather extremist, but I have come to the decision of expending zero minutes maintaining "IE-compliant rounded corners" in my pages, and dedicate this time to convince others to do the same. If you use IE and want to see those nice shadows, I'm sorry, you better cry to Microsoft and beg them for improving their CSS repertoire, or move to another browser (Firefox 3.1, Safari, Opera...).
