@ Mark Splinter

"i am charging double for IE compatibility now, and i will be explaining to clients that this is due to Microsoft being a steaming pile of shit"

At my company, while we don't exactly express our opinions about Microsoft to clients in quite that fashion, we do have a policy of cost loading on compatibility with various browsers. Our baseline price is quoted on W3C compliance (e.g. guaranteed to work in Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc). We then load additional costs for compatibility with any versions of IE the client wishes to provide support for. Full support for IE 6 and 7 on top of W3C compliance usually adds about 20-50% to the quote - e.g. a $1000.00 basic website with guaranteed W3C compliance turns into a $1200.00 - $1500.00 website if the client wants guaranteed support for IE 6 and 7 as well. How much extra we quote for depends on the complexity of the site layout and the estimated extent to which we'll have to kludge for IE. At a minimum is 3 separate CSS files (1 for IE 6, 1 for IE 7 and 1 for W3C), and there's usually additional PHP/Perl code to inject compensatory HTML depending on the browser detected.

We implemented this policy a few years ago when we found that most of our project overruns were the result of time wasted correcting rendering faults in IE. The clincher was a cost blowout on a major commercial project a while back that wiped out the entire profit we made from the job, purely because our designers had to spend several extra weeks testing and patching the site to work in 3 different versions of IE.

On our office bulletin board, we have a mock-up itemised bill to Microsoft for the extra time we've wasted making our sites work in their 'steaming pile of shit'. Currently it stands at over $200,000 Australian. It's a standing joke in the office that when it reaches the million dollar mark, we're going to send it to Microsoft in a coffin-shaped box along with some broken old IE install CDs!

So my friend, you're not alone in your decision! :)

IE

Do they still release it for Mac? No.

Do they still have a version for WinNT on Sun. Oh silly me.

The only platform that it exists on is Winblows. Most of the users seem to be the ones who are too stupid to look for a better browser. Microsoft might save a lot of money if they just gave up and directed people to a page with links to 3rd party browsers like Chrome, FireFox, Opera etc

Which is pretty much what you get if you try to download their WMV stuff for OSX these days.