Okay, I’m probably not the best person to talk on behalf  of Microsoft’s consumers as I don’t actually touch anything Microsoft apart from Internet Explorer to test sites in. The reason I’m not is because of this same question that remains unanswered. Why won’t they listen to consumers? In particular web developers: Why does Outlook not support all CSS and why doesn’t IE follow W3C standards?

We’re really not asking a lot. In fact we want to save them time and money in the long run. Microsoft needs to learn that it doesn’t need to do everything itself and open source projects such as Mozilla and WebKit are there for the taking. They just need to pick them up and they’re ready to go. What puzzles me about it all is it’s not a difficult thing for Microsoft to adopt one of these browser engines and build on them. They’re already more secure then IE will ever be, they work with WC3 standards and they don’t need to spend their money on developing something that seems like it will never actually be competitive with other browsers. They have the oldest and slowest browser on the market. See the results below from Peacekeeper.

They’re pretty dismal results, clearly the browser has passed it’s use by. There has been call outs everywhere for Microsoft to adopt one of the many browser engines yet they just flat out refuse to do it.

Internet Explorer is not the only product that they’re refusing to make web developer/user friendly and follow the standards. Outlook does not fully support CSS. Anyone who has ever made a HTML campaign with CSS will know how impossible it is to format and do the simplest thing without it looking like scrambled eggs in recent versions of Outlook. This inspired the wonderful fixoutlook.org. Back in 2000 they supported HTML now they’re using some terrible Word engine and for what? Here’s where I’m coming from, at what point do WORD and HTML even meet up. It doesn’t make sense. Why would you use a Word processor to render HTML? I don’t think this needs an explanation at all. It’s pretty straight forward, render HTML with a browser style engine, that’s what they’re built for.

So they say they’re listening, but I’m not sure that they are. The letter on this link doesn’t make sense. It shouldn’t even be a hard decision, support HTML, support standards. They’re there for a reason.

Feel free to have your say, I just wanted to share my opinion.