Opera Web Browser Corporation CTO Hakon Wium Lie recently published an open letter to Microsoft to encourage them to make their IE browser standards compliant. Opera has as well filed a complaint with the European Commission to force Microsoft to respect and use open Web standards in the design of its IE browser.

Håkon Lie is a respected authority in these matters not only as CTO of Opera, but also from his experience at CERN and W3C designing and contributing the standards the Web is based upon. In his open letter, Mr. Lie points out that despite Microsoft's considerable resources and talent, as well as for all the promises made on the subject, it still fails to implement open web standards. Mr. Lie points as an example how the Acid2 standard has not been implemented in IE, the web's most popular browser.

There has been a lot of reviews and talk on all sides of the browser coin in the last week with the anticipation of Mozilla's version 2 and Microsoft's IE7. Microsoft finally got it together and unleashed their long-awaited improvement after 5 years of living in a cave, while Firefox's version 2 officially launched this week as well. Some interesting articles written on the topic of these browsers can be found at the links below, just to give you a taste of what's being said out there: reviews, recaps, words from the powers that be. Best thing to do, download and tinker away.