IE is really pathetic...
* It's feature-bland, offering little to entice a user to use it, other than it comes with Windows
* It's riddled with security flaws (okay, yes, Firefox isn't perfect either, but it's still doing a lot better than IE)
* It's got pathetic support for web standards.
I recently started playing with Google Maps, specifically their API. I had been thinking of doing a website covering my travels around the country side, and figured the Google Maps API would be just perfect as a navigation medium. Get the map going, suck a whole load of co-ordinates out of a database, whack the markers on the map... bingo. :-)
The issue I hit, was when I tried absolute positioning of the <div> tags. The moment I tried setting style="position: absolute; right: 10px;...", Opera understood, Firefox understood, Konqueror understood, IE b0rked.
I've hacked around the problem by assuming a 720x540 screen area, and positioning accordingly, along with a warning notice about why the site looks crap, and what they can do about it. But I really hate IE as a result. I disliked it before as I see it as a huge security hole. Lets face it... any web browser that allows web applets, such as Windows Update, to alter critical system files, is an open door, and should not be used. Now, I hate coding for IE too, and thus am almost of the opinion of, Stuff it... the W3C says my code is correct, it works on every other browser, Microsoft can fix their crappy browser.
http://outdoors.longlandclan.hopto.org <-- That's the site there if people are wondering what I'm on about. At the moment, the hack simply looks for MSIE in the HTTP_USER_AGENT variable, and switches the stylesheet to use style-ie.css. I'll have to do the same for the photo album viewer too, but I'm less than enthusiastic about the whole issue. IE has left a really BAD taste in my mouth.
I know there are a lot of people who swear by IE, and are big critics of Mozilla and Opera, but I wonder how many of them would change their tune when doing cross-browser site development.