Kind of a long answer to this one…
Go over over to the website design and development forum and ask professionals there who work on this. Most of them will tell you IE is a necessary evil.
While many people say IE sucks, the truth is that IE 7 has done a lot improved standards support a great deal over version 6. The truth is also that it still lags far behind Opera, Safari and Firefox.
Most developers still have to write hacks and perform tricks to get pages to work properly in all browsers and platforms. Until now there are two common approaches:
[Approach 1] Write a page which works in IE and forgot about everyone else. This was a very popular choice at one stage (especially when IE had 90+% market share). To some extent it still is, but as other browsers gain market share it is becoming less and less compelling. This is the reason why so many sites break in browsers other than IE. IE is more forgiving of poorly coded sites, which furthers complicates the issue.
[Approach 2] Write pages for standards keep you fingers cross it works in IE. If not write conditional comments and extra code until it works in IE 7. Then tackle IE 6…
Apple is using their considerable influence to try and pave the way for another route.
[Approach 3] Write pages for standards, forget about IE.
The two intended outcomes are:
[A] For IE 8 to become a first class browser for CSS and Javascript support. This would be preferable as choice is great for everyone.
Firefox, Safari, Opera and other browsers (which already provide first class standards support) to gain market share. Enterprises will then begin to provide these browsers as an option.
Unfortunately until that happens there will be some pain for users like yourself caught up in a bigger strategic “game” Apple is playing. Whilst this might not be any consolation now it is for the greater good. With open standards everyone is on a level playing field.
You may be wondering why open standards on the web is so important to Apple? It is a good question, the answer is a simple economic one. Apple is not committed to open standards on the web for any other reason that it allows them to sell hardware which does not require proprietary 3rd party software, whether that be Adobe Flash, Adobe Air or Microsoft Silverlight.
Hypothetically speaking — imagine a scenario where Adobe decide to halt development of a Flash client for the Macintosh. Then Mac computers would only work with “some of the Internet”. Result: Apple sells less hardware.
As a concrete example of this in action: Apple notebooks get very hot and noisy (fan noise) when users spend any time on the YouTube video sharing site. Apple is in a position where they are absolutely powerless to do anything about this because Adobe control the Flash plugin.
Adobe have thus far proved themselves to be poor at delivering a high quality plugin for the Macintosh. This is a situation which Apple is far from happy about, putting it mildly.
Apple is however able to provide a very compelling YouTube experience on iPhone/iPod touch without the heat, noise and inefficiency of the experience on the Macintosh. That's because they have circumnavigated Flash video and have negotiated with Google to serve the content up in the ISO standard H.264 format.
EDIT: The way I've written this is from the perspective of Apple getting their way and forcing their agenda of open standards which allows them to sell lots of computers and gadgets.
Of course they could fail and Flash/Silverlight and the like could become essentials for web browsing. Who knows? We will see.
