Maciej Stachowiak, who is on the Apple Safari development team, has no intention of breaking the web (seen on Daring Fireball)

The more I look at it, the more I see this as Microsoft’s problem. Webkit and Gecko developers shouldn’t be having to deal with this crap. Too bad if backward-compatibility breaks. The web is an ecosystem. Each website is a living organism that needs to grow, change, or die. The WayBack Machine is evidence of that.

As Maciej Stachowiak points out, version targeting will stifle cloud computing. The Nokia S60 Browser and the Google Android platform are built on top of Webkit, not to mention the iPhone and the iPod Touch, and it’s ridiculous to burden mobile devices with legacy crap.

What Microsoft probably needs to do is simply allow multiple versions of IE to exist on a Windows install. Browse intranet or local documents with IE6 or IE7. Browse the web with IE8. No meta tags or kludgy HTTP headers.