Following the IE9 preview at MIX10 (the good stuff starts around 47:30), all the major browsers assembled for a rare meeting to discuss the state of CSS3. This is what they said.
IE9: Hey, guys! I’m IE9.
Other browsers: Oh, hey! We’ve been hearing a lot about you.
IE9: Yeah! And I’m really excited, because now I have CSS3!
Other browsers: Oooh, neat! So you have text-shadow, gradients, font-face, box-shadow, all that stuff we have? This is great!
IE9: Let’s look at border-radius. People love border-radius.
Other browsers: Um, ok.
IE9: Lemme give you a little demo. See, if you have a huge dotted border, you guys all suck. But look at me! There are actual dots!
Other browsers: Hm, yeah, looks like it. But how often do people use huge dotted–
IE9: How the heck can you call yourselves good CSS3 browsers when a huge dotted border is so frickin’ ugly? So what I’m going to do is publish some test suites so that you can fix the CSS3 stuff that you guys don’t do well.
Other browsers: Test suites? Oh, ok. Like Acid3?
IE9: Acid3 is “interesting” and we’ll work on it raising our score. But check out that border-radius thing! That’s just messed up.
Other browsers: I guess we’ll stick with the IE CSS hacks for now then.
IE9: So these test suites will help you guys can fix all this stuff you’re doing wrong with CSS3. Because we don’t want to reach a point where people have to massage code to work across different browsers.
Other browsers: Yeah, that would completely suck. By the way, how’re IE6 and IE7 doing anyway?