Over the last 24 hours, I crossed a certain threshhold.

Originally, I was 100% biased in favor of IE (back in the days of IE3 and IE4). When Firefox came around I thought it was good that IE got some competition. But it wasn't long before I realized that IE was not competing anymore, it had dropped out of the race.

Eventually comes CSS 3 proposal drafts and HTML 5 proposal drafts, and the Webkit/Safari and Mozilla teams are on top of them, but IE is pooping along still trying to figure out how to spell "CSS 2.1". So I got angry and frustrated and started suggesting that IE8 had better clean up its act or boycotting of IE may commence on my part.

Now I am officially an IE hater. I applied the following CSS style:

div.ProfileQuestions {
    background-color: white;
}

.., overriding a default light gray color, and suddenly, erratically, about 1/3 of the off-black colored text vanished. Where did it go? I do not know! I fired up the IE Developer Toolbar, used the inspection tool, and as my mouse hovered over the areas where the text belonged, once again, erratically, text showed up while the hover border surrounded it, then disappeared when I moved my mouse away.

Could my computer be out of resources? I closed Internet Explorer, all instances, and then opened up the page again. The text showed up. I hit refresh. Now half the text was missing. I used my mouse to select the page's rendered text, some of the missing text appeared.

Safari 3, Firefox 3, Opera 9.5, all of these showed the page fine.

Surely I have a corrupt IE installation! I sent the URL to a co-worker and asked her to look at it. She, too, was using IE 7. She, too, was finding that there was text that was just plain gone.

I tried forcing the text to be black. I tried variations of background colors. Nothing I did, except to leave the background color defaulting to the body background of light gray, could stop IE from making random lines of text just vanish.

Internet Explorer 7 is used by a MASSIVE portion of the Internet browsing community. I am flabbergasted by this cheap rendering behavior, and that statistic of IE7 usage NEEDS TO CHANGE or else we will have a broken web indefinitely.

Let the boycott commence.