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I hope I'm not getting carried away in this discussion, given my passion for the topic and disappointment in IE. Apologies if so. I suppose you see cutting edge

I hope I'm not getting carried away in this discussion, given my passion for the topic and disappointment in IE. Apologies if so. I suppose you see cutting edge as frivolity, but yes, IE is entirely incapable of the more advanced and interesting things that Firefox and Chrome can now do. Hence, one might write a degraded version for IE, or a separate version in Flash. The thing is, all other browsers are very good about getting their users to upgrade, so I don't really think about a degraded Firefox, Safari, Opera or Chrome version. S I've coded myself into corners testing with Firefox and Safari, then had to redo it a lot for IE to work. Maybe it's just mainly painful memories from when I was starting out. About 4% of our users are using IE9 currently, so I haven't heard much user feedback about the JScript speed. I do hope everyone upgrades soon, of course. I don't work for an enterprise, and I am the only full time developer in my (micro) company. With everything I have to do, testing in 5-6 versions of IE has been a big problem for me in the past. Given that my experience does not seem to be isolated or anomalous, I don't think I'm doing anything wrong. Perhaps Google and Mozilla have made mistakes, and update too often - but their situation is so clearly superior to Microsoft's, who can't even figure out how to get some people to upgrade from a browser released 10 years ago, that it's clear which system is working better. As usual, the ideal style lies somewhere in between.

Silhouette 15y ago
Now, most of that I can agree with. I have nothing against moving the industry forward, and of course I wish all my users and my clients' ones would upgrade in timely fashion. My main observations in this discussion is simply that moving the industry forward only works if it's done at a pace where the content providers can take advantage of it. Personally, I don't for an instant believe that Google's and now Mozilla's release schedules with only a few weeks of gap help to achieve that goal. Meanwhile, they can and have screwed things up that have worked fine for years and are in widespread use on web sites today, and I think they are in real danger of reverting to the completely non-standardised web of yesteryear, which makes developing corner cases specially for IE look like a walk in the park. For what it's worth, I find it even more disturbing that even so-called standards groups, particularly WHATWG, now seem to be moving to "evolving" documents. They seem to have utterly missed the point of what standards are for. As you've probably realised by now, I'm no worshipper at the altar of Redmond either. I do wish they would consider releasing faster than every couple of years, and I don't buy their nonsense argument about IE9 being unable to run on XP for a microsecond. (What they say may well be technically true, but it smacks of the kind of arguments they made a few years about during the anti-trust case, that they can't possibly separate browser from $OS because of $DEPENDENCY, where $DEPENDENCY appears to have been easily avoidable if they'd coded things up a bit differently.)

Silhouette 15y ago

Now, most of that I can agree with. I have nothing against moving the industry forward, and of course I wish all my users and my clients' ones would upgrade in timely fashion. My main observations in this discussion is simply that moving the industry forward only works if it's done at a pace where the content providers can take advantage of it. Personally, I don't for an instant believe that Google's and now Mozilla's release schedules with only a few weeks of gap help to achieve that goal. Meanwhile, they can and have screwed things up that have worked fine for years and are in widespread use on web sites today, and I think they are in real danger of reverting to the completely non-standardised web of yesteryear, which makes developing corner cases specially for IE look like a walk in the park. For what it's worth, I find it even more disturbing that even so-called standards groups, particularly WHATWG, now seem to be moving to "evolving" documents. They seem to have utterly missed the point of what standards are for. As you've probably realised by now, I'm no worshipper at the altar of Redmond either. I do wish they would consider releasing faster than every couple of years, and I don't buy their nonsense argument about IE9 being unable to run on XP for a microsecond. (What they say may well be technically true, but it smacks of the kind of arguments they made a few years about during the anti-trust case, that they can't possibly separate browser from $OS because of $DEPENDENCY, where $DEPENDENCY appears to have been easily avoidable if they'd coded things up a bit differently.)