Study Curve

I agree, while some sites decide to be proprietary and demand you use ie firefox is still better on all levels. If you find a site like that just get the emulator addon to firefox to render pages like in ie. Problem solved.

I was going to answer this, but mrsugar nailed it, that and ie7 is crap.

It seems that the last answer provided pretty much explains a lot of the differences between standards based browsers and IE. One other thing to note is that IE uses a completely different rendering engine than a lot of "gecko engine" based browsers. Some will say that this rending runs faster than Firefox or Safari but now days HTML load tests seem to tell a different story.

Pretty much the world would be a better place if no one ever used Internet Explorer again.

Since HTML is just a markup language, it's up for interpretation how that markup can be rendered. The W3C (world web web consortium) has produced standards on how HTML and CSS (cascading style sheets) should be rendered. Firefox follows these standards quite strictly while IE does not, which leads to web pages being rendered differently. Usually web designers have to put in special code to compensate for IE's inadaquacies. Just to note, so far the only browser to pass the W3C's "Acid 2 Test" for full standards compliance for CSS is Apple's Safari web browser (now available for Windows).