It’s time to stop blaming Internet Explorer

Whether it's IE, FF3.6 or whomever else, I'll blame them for stifling my creativity and ability to make things work and look good in a timeframe that doesn't make me pull my hair out. Telling us that we're not meant to work in web if we can't handle these things is a weak argument; I expect a bit of pull and tug in any line of work, and I'll gladly do it, but when the time spent troubleshooting for older/inconsistent browsers is so detrimental to a team's ability to meet deadlines time and time again that you have to hire people specifically for it instead of using that money to innovate elsewhere, something's amiss.

I can only assume how many developers there are at Yahoo!, no less redundant roles and people that have been debugging these issues for a decade+ and know the problems they'll run into like the back of their hand. Smaller agencies and development teams don't have those people to rely on and they shouldn't have to.

"What makes the web beautiful is precisely that there are multiple browsers and, if you build things correctly, your sites and applications work in them all."

I work for a company that develops web applications, and I can tell you that the above statement is absolute hogwash. It's a major PITA to implement features such that the user experience is uniform and consistent across all major browsers. In a lot of cases we have had to decide against implementing certain features because they required technologies that were available only in browser X (and X almost always turns out to be Chrome or Firefox).

This is not good for the web, and it does not make the web "beautiful." It's basically fragmentation.