It's always been ironic - like people saying you should use Chrome/FF over IE because they were standards compliant... and yet only 30% of the market. Saying just because they were better browsers was fine, but standards don't really sell browsers :-)
There is a clear difference between a formal standard and a defacto standard and Microsoft is the king of owning defacto standards.
Is this comic so standards compliant that it only runs well on IE9? Because, if so, this is a special breed of irony.