It's great that Microsoft has (for whatever reason, it doesn't matter) taken up the banner of standards compliance, modernization, etc. It doesn't change the f

It's great that Microsoft has (for whatever reason, it doesn't matter) taken up the banner of standards compliance, modernization, etc. It doesn't change the fact that IE9 is still a pain in the ass for real-world developers making the current generation of applications. I'm not talking about web sites, I mean the full-featured applications we engineers claim can be done in modern "HTML5" browsers without plugins. When the business people say "ok, we want one", one of the first discussions everyone has is which browsers have to be supported. That's really code for "how much extra do you want to spend to make it look right in Internet Explorer"? You can make blanket statements that anyone who has trouble with IE9 is incompetent, but I know from working with them that we have an amazing frontend team who are building a great "desktop quality" application. And the numbers in the bug database tell the story: 37 IE9-specific issues reported, only one or two for other browsers. These aren't issues of baseline support or graceful degradation, they're basic behavior and layout problems. Some examples: IE9: When editing the xxx field it overlaps the chart icon IE9: Data points not displayed when hovering the mouse over the locus points in chart IE9: xxx dropdown is obscured by above pane and also overlaps start date IE9: Clicking on Logout link spawns Session Time Out modal even though session has not expired Can smart developers fix these kinds of problems? Sure, they can and do. The question is whether it's worth adding 15-20% more work to a project to support IE9. Is it time to stop blaming Internet Explorer? Not at all: it's time to start properly accounting for the effort it takes to support Internet Explorer so that businesses can weigh the true cost against market share when making the "minimum browser" decision.