It's difficult to be humble once you've thrown a toddler tantrum

The problem is this... so many nerds have spent a third of their entire lifetime slagging off IE and bashing it over security and web standards that they simply can't swallow their pride and accept that it's changed and continues to change.

The fact is, IE8 is a good browser. It may not be as good as Opera 10.5 or Webkit when it comes to cutting edge stuff (but then neither is Firefox), but it handles real-world pages very well. The last few websites I've made have not had a *single* glitch in IE8 after the first attempt. IE7 still always has a couple of minor quirks that need fixing and IE6 needs help. But IE8 is fine.

I don't care about CSS3, HTML5 or fancy Javascript objects and methods because none of that is of any use in IE6, and that's the browser that matters, just like NS4 still mattered 10 years ago. Rounded corners and box shadows are nice, but not vital, so what's the problem if old versions of IE don't render them? Why double my workload by embedding videos into web pages using HTML5 *and* Flash, or using CSS3 *and* inline images to create rounded corners? The old fashioned methods *have* to be used, and still work perfectly well in all of them, including the ones that do HTML5/CSS3.

Frankly, IE probably needs rounded corners more than it needs HTML5 video. Web designers will be happy to stick to Flash as long as old browsers are a consideration and the end users will never have a clue about how or why the video they see is there, whereas eye candy like rounded corners, CSS3 transformations and shadows most definitely will make the end user think that a supporting browser is superior to one which renders flat, square boxes that don't swirl around when you hover over them. Even then, a lot of what CSS3 transformations offer can already be done (and much better) in Flash - which works just fine in all existing browsers, including IE6. End users and (to not quite the same extent) web designers couldn't give a stuff that the HTML methods are open and don't require commercial proprietary plugins. They just want it to work, and in the case of web designers, Flash also gives them a superficial reassurance that their code can't easily be nicked.

So, while IE8 is still behind the others, it's still closer to Firefox than IE7, and closer than Firefox is to Webkit or Opera 10.5. Some people are going to find it very hard to stop bashing IE, no matter how good it gets or how many more security holes Firefox racks up compared to it.

Yes, IE8 is what IE6 should have been, and MS deserve to be reminded of what they did to the web over the last 10 years, but that doesn't mean every effort they now make should be spat upon. That says as much about you as the IE6 situation says about them. You're just a playground bully, with internet forums being your playground.

I'm really looking forward to IE9, and hope between that and support for W2K expiring, IE6 will disappear over the next three years. The world is moving on and, as ever, leaving bitter people behind in its wake.

Screw HTML5...

Where's the real XHTML support.

Microsoft and Apple being so pally lately is really starting to grate.

Nobody who does webdev professionally gives a damn about HTML5. Because it's useless.

Go away Apple, go away Microsoft, would you please. You're both damaging the internet like you both have been doing for decades.