Disclaimer: This is not a rant question whatsoever.
I do a lot of web development and I manipulate websites on a daily basis at my work. Something I always come across when fixing things is that Internet Explorer requires several fixes to display properly. I know that Microsoft has a "do it our way" mentality which works in some cases but why isn't IE standards-compliant? Is there any benefit here for the company?
Well, at the time IE 4, 5, and 6 were created.. there were no standards - there was a rough idea of what to do, and a godaweful morass of tags only supported on netscape or IE, and browser specific quirks - the standard way to fix was.. coding for each browser seperately.
The Standards we use now came later, and really, they're not very evenly supported across browsers.
Now, things get worse. People code for IE6. They use software that outputs 'html' that's crap.. and works on IE and nothing else. They do all sorts of ugly hacks... and when standards compliance breaks it, they complain.
MS has a bit of a tightrope between the 'legacy support' and 'standards compliance' crowds , so it'll take a while for standards to be totally met
