HTML and CSS Standardization

I am determined to stick it out with complete use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) in favor of traditional techniques involving the use of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) tables, from the standpoint of positioning elements within the browser page.
Standardization, or lack thereof, is the bane of website development which aspires to work on all major supported browsers. I know the challenge that awaits me.
I have IE 8, Firefox 3.6.9 and Chrome 3 (no compelling reason to upgrade to the new Chrome version). In terms of those three browsers, performance is inversely proportional to market share. It boggles my mind why IE 8 is such a dog when it comes to performance. My website development is done with Firefox using its Firebug debugging capability. I recently upgraded to 3.6.9 from 3.5 and Firefox performance got worse. Still it is faster than IE 8 by a long shot. Chrome 3 is by far the fastest of the three. My concern is that Chrome 6 is slower. Because I use Chrome 3 for standardization testing, that version is sufficient for my purpose.
My typical development mode is to get things working in Firefox, keeping in mind the known things that do not work in IE. Then I test on Chrome 3 which does not provide any surprises - it works as expected. By the time that I have tested in Firefox and Chrome, I go to IE which shows its incompatibility from time to time. Internet searches reveal the top outstanding problems associated with IE versus the other browsers.
With a 50% market share of users, there is no denying IE. It has to be supported if I want to be open to the large user base percentage. See browser market share for more statistics.
See Browser Wars.
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