Spent a frustrating hour or two debugging an IE+Flash bug. Turns out I'm not the only one who needs to redouble our efforts on Internet Explorer support. In the process of debugging an IE error, I ran into the JS bug above, on Bing no less. Irony in action.
It makes sense that Internet Explorer doesn't act right or feel right. That its developer tools are shoddy and unacceptable. If you make billions of dollars on maintaining desktop hegemony... yeah, you're not going to invest heavily in things that disrupt that. You know, like this whole web revolution thing. Who suffers? Developers first, and ultimately, if you believe like I do that we truly live in the information age-- all of society. Innovation stifled for profit motive.
Microsoft makes about $10 billion per monopoly per year (Windows + Office). If the the company impedes the progress of web software by just two years (arguably given their market share, it is far more than that), that's $40 billion in pure profit. When the billions roll in, you do what you gotta do.