Which browser?

I'm also a web developer (front-end flavoured) and I'm not really looking forward to IE9 becoming semi-mainstream because they're guaranteed to fuck up the box model somewhere for the umpteenth time. Development for IE is like death by 1000 tiny layout anomalies and I have no reason to expect their latest one to be any different.

Lies ... Everyone poor web dev goes on about how IE6 and IE7 break the box model. It doesn't, my margin and paddings work as expected.

Most issues that I have with IE6 and IE7 are to do with "hasLayout" and double margin bugs (which are easily fixed).

We used to have a guy at work who said these problems existed ... his CSS was utter crap. Funnily enough the other 3 front end developers and myself had no problem with IE6's box model, he was eventually let-go.

The only time I have to use alternative style sheets is when the browser doesn't have the feature i.e. Alpha PNG support or inline-block. Then again I write pixel perfect CSS, so this eliminates 99% of the problems straight away.

IE8 renders pretty much everypage exactly the same as modern browsers as long as it is in standards mode (i.e. XHTML), and was the first browser to be CSS 2.1 compliant. JS interpretation is really slow, compared to the newest browser and there is very limited CSS 3.0 selector and HTML 5 support.

IE9 I have been using from developer previews, it has lighting fast page rendering, great font rendering. Very good support for HTML 5 and CSS 3.0 ... (it passes every CSS 3.0 selector test) and is as good as Chrome/Opera/Firefox. The new interface is pretty nice as well, a major improvement.