Sometimes I wonder if the guys on the Internet Explorer weblog realize that they're making a big deal over something very small or if they truly think they are making big accomplishments.

I was nearly laughing when they made a huge deal over adopting Firefox's newsfeed icon, and now they have a big long post about supporting the select element better. Don't get me wrong, it's important that they fix up all of these minor problems (as well as the big ones), but come on, it isn't like they've just added support for a large portion of SVG or XHTML support or anything particularly significant. Does it really need a huge announcement making this new support out to be a big triumph? Perhaps for Internet Explorer, a product that's been stale for several years now, it is a big triumph, but it's peanuts compared to the development work going on in the other major browsers, and I hate to see the media present these improvements out of perspective. I'm sorry guys, but using Firefox's feed icon is not a move to support standards, it's simply a reasonable minor UI choice and is hardly worth a few sentences of explanation, let alone the shameful boasting that went on (although my impression of that may be affected by all of the media attention this got).

Support XHTML, CSS table displays, all CSS 2.1 selectors and pseudo-classes, at least Firefox's current level of support for :before and :after, the correct box model (meaning correct support for width and height), the inherit CSS value, the standard DOM event model, and a usable chunk of SVG, and then you can start to praise yourselves. Sadly, even with all of that accomplished, you'll still be far behind the rest of the competition. You have a long way to go to catch up to Firefox and Opera, and I think it's rather pathetic that you get excited over a tiny step in a hundred-mile journey.