I just spent the most of last Thursday trying to get some content to fade properly in IE with help from Chris. It still doesn’t, but it works well enough. When something seemingly simple takes up an entire day to make work in one browser, I’d consider that technology not quite ready. Even using jQuery which is supposed to make all the browser differences not such a big deal, and it does a great job at that for the most part. Seems you can’t adjust opacity and other attributes on elements in IE, something that works no problem in Chrome or Firefox. So the animation IE ends up with less effects and doesn’t look nearly as polished. And the best part about this, is the animation is for a Microsoft site.

Anyways, if HTML5/JavaScript/whatever is going to take over doing all the things Flash already does (and does pretty well for the most part) cross browser support needs to be way better. We are pretty much there with Firefox and Chrome/Safari, but IE is so far behind and has such a huge market share (about 2/3′s) that is impractical to code everything in JavaScript because you have to spend twice as long as you should to make sure it works in all the browsers correctly. Where as Flash, I code it once, it works in every browser. It just makes things so much simpler to have a common platform to develop for that works everywhere.