Having read the entire thread, I think I will throw in my 2 cents.
If you want a suite, get Netscape or Mozilla. If you want a browser only, get IE or Opera. *All* of the latest versions of them (by latest i mean up to 3 years old) are *fully* standards compliant. they all perform about the same, and thanks to Mozilla/Netscape's skinning, they can all be made to look the same too.
If you want to blame anyone for pages not rendering properly, blame web authors. Ultimately, it's them that have forced the slow uptake of standards, by not sticking to them. If you look at any of my HTML pages, you will always find this
code:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
at the top. I also put *every single page* through the W3C's own validator, and the pages don't get uploaded unless I get the 'Passed' result.
My pages are XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant (until GeoCities adds its fluff to the end of the file): most web pages aren't even fully HTML 3.2 compliant. No wonder they break in certain browsers!