While I agree in principal, you can use one of the available rendering engine add-ins in FireFox so that you can view your content in FF but using the IE engine. You can switch on the fly or have one tab viewing that page in FF and another tab viewing the page in an IE tab.
Done that way, you also have access to the FF add-ins I mentioned.
The FF add-ins we simply cannot live without and use daily:
- Web Developer (currently at ver 1.1.3)
- FireBug (currently at ver 1.05)
- IE Tab (currently at ver 1.3.2.20070404)
- ColorZilla (currently at ver 1.0)
- View Source Chart (currently at ver 2.5.02)
- Dummy Lipsum (currently at ver 1.2.0)
The 1st three in the list are "must haves, cannot live without, use on a daily basis".
We maintain/develop over 250 private school websites (and adding about 10-15 per month) using a custom written portal framework we wrote from the ground up and continue to add to daily.
The standard here is to develop using FF, but also checking the end result in IE (from current, back to ver 5.5), and on Mac's using Safari and FF.
It is a hard sell to use IE as your standard when it still doesn't follow standards itself, regardless of what your analytics tell you the most popular browser users are visiting your site with.
As far as a "clear winner", I find it hard to believe it is IE7 when the majority of users using IE are still using 6.0. What we've found is that based on tens of thousands of vistors weekly, that currently, the "clear winner" is in this order:
- IE 6.0
- IE 7.0
- FF 2.0
- FF 1.5
What we have found also through analysis, is that FF users are more prone to update their browsers to newer versions than IE users.