I get a lot of stupid meaningless messages, that require nothing more than a click to get rid of, but I have to click.

I see no point in limiting yourself to a particular platform, especially in business. Making things difficult for potential customers is not a winning practice.

That is understandable for Microsoft but inexcusable for any other vendor.

For one thing, the constructs and technologies once missing in non-Microsoft browsers (e.g., all the XMLHttpRequest stuff and the oh-so-essential innerHTML property) are now present at least in Firefox and, I believe, all the other Mozilla/Gecko/etc.-based browsers, so there’s really no reason to go outside the de facto standard feature set even if you exceed the W3C DOM a bit.

For another, if it’s too much bother to restrain oneself just a bit on the use of features, there are libraries that can insulate you from the differences. I don’t use ’em, though I’m thinking about using the Yahoo! UI library (free BSD license) for AJAX stuff.

Does HP think its customers won’t notice? does it have a deal with Bill? or are its web developers just lazy? Nah… not lazy. Someone ordered this.

On my current job, the specified target platform is recent versions of IE, but I’m testing occasionally in Firefox just so that when they change their minds they won’t be stuck.

As for the Windows patches, I applied ’em, but the only negative effect so far is a strange empty error message popped when I start SQL Server Management Studio. Dismiss the message and everything works fine. Sheesh!

I have a fully patched version of IE, but only because HP uses it for their update, not giving me the option of Firefox.