IE still sucks...

I was given a small internal web project to work on last week. The best part about it was that I was given free reign on it's design and technologies used. I was pretty excited since I could finally use all of the new HTML/CSS/ECMAScript standards (existing and proposed). This was mainly nice since I didn't have to do stupid hacks and things for all of the different flavors of IE.

I didn't 'have' to support IE for this project but decided that I'd finish the project and then see how the new IE8 faired.

Well... I was, not surprisingly, let down again by IE. Here are a few things I noticed right off the bat.

1) No canvas support :( STILL!!! Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera support this. I guess MS is not being pro-active about supporting new standards as the canvas tag is part of the HTML5 spec. There is however this project ExplorerCanvas which does some nice javascript conversions to VML for IE so that you can use most of the features of the canvas tag.

2) Proposed ECMAScript Harmony features have been left out. This is funny since MS was one of the big proponents of limiting the proposed features of ES4 and yet they still can't get the limited functionality implemented (of which Firefox and Safari already support). For instance the new getters/setters and 'foreach' function of arrays makes IE8 confused (these are just a couple I noticed).

I wasn't too surprised by this lack of new features. But I was surprised to see some CSS3 selectors working, and that the site rendered very close to how Firefox and Safari/Chrome did (but not exactly, as there where still some things that where off). So I guess I'm happy that IE has made a huge jump since IE7, but it's still not there which sucks since IE6 is still one of the most dominant browsers used so I guess we can all look forward to missing things in IE8 for the foreseeable future. Ugghh..