The Internet Explorer feedback system is really starting to annoy me. There was a bug filed for adding proper support for the "inherit" CSS keyword. It has received 7 votes (which is quite a bit at this time), 5 of which gave the highest importance rating. So what does Microsoft do? They closed the bug report. Why? Because the current level of support is "By Design". That is, they don't consider it a bug, they consider it a feature suggestion, and the bug report system has an option to specify feature suggestions. Okay, fine, it should have been a feature suggestion, but seriously, did they really have to close the whole bug report and force us to file a brand new one? Why didn't they just change the category?

I'm trying to do my part and help to improve Internet Explorer, and it just feels like Microsoft is fighting us with this system. So much of this system was gone about the wrong way, and if they want us to consider them anywhere close to on par with Mozilla (whose bug tracking system Bugzilla is truly an excellent system), they need to step it up a notch. If they can't provide a feedback system that doesn't fight us every step of the way, there's nothing wrong with using Bugzilla, the current industry leader.

Just would like to state my point, I have seen you really fighting this IE browser so firmly, well I know where you are coming from, you are on that side of browsers, the open-source, while a lot of people as myself are on this side, IE side. What I mean to say, is that if you use the same browser for say, 5 years, you get to like it and get used to its features, when something new comes to town you have to reject it. Europeans are using FireFox more and more each day, especially that its free, while we in the Middle East have an over 95% IE usage, meaning it is going to be REALLY hard to switch, and tell you the truth, I havn't seen enough in FireFox that encourages a switch. I think the major reason is that we develop .NET solutions in 90% of the time in the area, and we depend on IE functionality a lot more than its support for CSS. Personally, I am still waiting for the "behaviors" css rule to be applied in FireFox so that I ever start dealing with it, right now, I put a small disclaimer on all my websites: this website will NOT work on any other browser than MSIE 6.0 and above... do you see my side of it now?

There are a few major problems with that position:

First of all, there are real reasons for the way the standards were designed, and real reasons for using semantic markup, separation of content, presentation, and behavior, and all of the other philosophies the standards are based around. I recommend that you do some reading in the area.

Second, depending on Internet Explorer's behavior is simply ridiculous because they have said straight-out that that behavior will change in future versions. They *intend* to be standards-compliant, meaning that they are trying to get Internet Explorer to display pages the way Firefox, Opera, and Safari do (aside from their own bugs, of course). Without me changing anything, this website will look correct in some future version of Internet Explorer. Meanwhile, the site you're designing only for Internet Explorer will probably never look correct in anything but Internet Explorer, and it will start to fall apart in newer versions of IE.

So basically, your position is only valid for the short term. Firefox, Opera, Safari, and the rest will only implement IE's CSS extensions if the W3C writes up a specification that makes it to Candidate Recommendation status. The behavior property was proposed in the 1999 CSS behavioral extensions draft, which looks like it may have been abandoned, probably for good reasons. If browsers start to support things before they are standardized, we'll run into the same terrible mess that emerged from the IE vs. Netscape browser wars, costing web developers a significant amount of time and effort that should have been avoidable.

You can go ahead and continue to develop websites only for Internet Explorer, but remember: overall IE usage used to be over 90% and a lot of web developers felt safe only developing for IE, but once that number began to fall and Firefox gained popularity, many of those sites had to undergo major redesigns to keep from losing their customers, and web developers who couldn't write cross-browser pages were fired.

There's a big difference between supporting only one browser and supporting practically everything except one browser. As far as the things on this website that break in Internet Explorer, what you're seeing isn't Internet Explorer "standards", you're seeing legitimate bugs and lack of basic widely-supported features that they are scrambling to fix. Microsoft has had a part in developing some very good web technology in the past, and the good ones have been or are being incorporated in W3C standards. Microsoft is a part of that process. The majority of the web development community wants them to follow this process the same way other browser makers do. If an open standard is reached, other browsers will implement it. If the specification never reaches CR status, there is probably something fundamentally wrong with it, and other browsers avoid it. It's a very simple process and it is already showing positive results. People of your mentality used to be the majority, but now you are very much the minority in the web development community because people have seen how this process works, and they see how developing according to the standards and good practice rules is usually much easier than working with Internet Explorer's poorly designed implementations, it gives much more assurance regarding how browsers will render the page in the future, and it offers other benefits in regard to accessibility, bandwidth costs, etc.

I wouldn't have a problem with Internet Explorer if it was nearly as good at handling the basic standard web technologies as the other browsers. I was really excited about the effort they claimed to be putting into IE7, but then I saw that the improvements to (X)HTML and DOM were negligible and they not only made little progress in CSS development but even broke some new things, it was just another huge disappointment from them. They openly claimed that the vast majority of their layout engine development was focused on CSS support, yet the end result is as bad as it is. I think the Internet Explorer development team has some real talent in it, but for whatever reason, whether it's due to upper management, lack of time/resources, or working off a fundamentally flawed codebase (or a combination of the above), they aren't simply aren't meeting their own goals, nor the very vocal demand from the majority of the web development community.

I will continue to encourage people to switch away from Internet Explorer as long as it's so far behind the rest of the major browsers in safe-to-use (standardized) web technology and as long as it still has so many security problems.

mmm, well if we refer to how pages are rendered, then you are absolutely correct, FireFox does indeed have less problems, and it displays things more correct, but you missed the point, the websites i was referring to are really "applications" rather than statis or blog-like websites, I have visited few web applications done for FireFox like basecamp which is amazing and does all the ajax tricks, but i once have looked at the javascript of another web-based application to find it four times bigger than a javascript I would do for IE... I still believe when i comes to fuctionalities, javascript, web-based applications (especially to a well-defined audience) IE has a lot more to offer, and you know what? I think they are very well aware of that and they depend on it (Microsoft monkeys that is)
that is why I think you really should go easy on the thing, it is not all bad... although I must admit I do not like IE7.0 even as a developer :(

Well this post itself was about the Internet Explorer feedback system, which, compared to Bugzilla, is quite primitive and I believe poorly managed at the moment.

As for the websites you were referring to, what you are seeing is probably DOM manipulation versus innerHTML, not Firefox versus Internet Explorer. Both browsers support both methods, although innerHTML currently isn't part of any W3C standard (which very well may change in the near future). innerHTML is much smaller as far as script size and tends to execute faster, although it's also messier at times and gives you less control over what exactly is happening on the page (which may or may not matter, depending on the situation). I tend to prefer working with DOM manipulation, especially in small apps where speed and efficiency isn't as important and you might as well stick with the standard approach that has more consistent implementations.

As for scripting on the whole, Internet Explorer does not have more to offer, at least to any practical extent. They do have loads of proprietary stuff, but the reality is that alternative browsers like Firefox, Opera, and Safari are quickly becoming more and more significant internationally and they stick more closely to the W3C. Microsoft is free to propose the additional features to the W3C (that's what it's there for, after all), and they have. But until the W3C comes up with a formal standard, other browsers will be extremely hesitant to implement it and therefore web developers won't realistically be able to use it. You might find this annoying, but we have learned from past mistakes that this process is hugely important.

Now, if you take a look at the W3C-recommended DOM that Internet Explorer does support (and therefore the only stuff most of us are safe to use), my point comes to life. There's a lot of stuff in there that we can't use because of Internet Explorer's lack of support, even though there's an open standard on exactly how those features are supposed to be handled by the browser.