I used to rail against IE. I even bought 2 domains that I planned to use as a totally cliche "IE sucks" website. In the past six months I've changed my attitude towards IE. It still leaves much to he desired and versions 6 - 8 are still worth complaining about but I must say the IE9 has been a huge improvement to the point where I've stopped my grumbling. The amount of work it takes to get JavaScript and CSS working consistently across browsers is still more with IE9 but the amount of extra effort is so trivial that I think what I perceive to be harder to get to work in IE compared to Gecko and Webkit is actually an illusion based on a bias towards hating/loving to hate Internet Explorer pre-IE9 and that it's actually not all that difficult at all. At this point I think my (and many other) developers' disdain for IE says more about my own skill at the time than it said about Internet Explorer. And even now when I have a troubling time with IE and curse it to hell I think it's only difficult for me because I've invested so much time into learning the quirks of Gecko and Webkit but always ignored/avoided learning about Trident and IE because of my prejudice. Many times I had a case of "my code is right and this browser is wrong no matter what".

Now I have to say I was wrong about IE. It's not the awful monstrosity of a browser I've learned (or rather been taught as the case many times was) to hate. There's no disputing the fact that Internet Explorer from v6 to v8 got stale, held the web back, and was a pain to work with. The IE team got so used to creating the rules rather than playing by them that they seemed to think their reign would last forever and they seemed to ignore all standards for a time (in the case of the Trident CSS box model I have to admit I think that makes more sense). However this is not then. Today's Internet Explorer has a bigger problem with prejudice and it's reputation than anything technically inferior.

There's still a lot left to be desired from IE like a shorter release cycle that adopts new specs and standards like the Webkit and Gecko browsers are doing but despite that there's still not very much you can do in Firefox, Chrome, Safari, or Opera that can't be done with roughly equal effort in IE. And with IE10 the gap is closing even more. Sure, Microsoft has made some intentional decisions to support or not support certain features or purposely implement them differently but both Firefox and Chrome make similar decisions and are applauded for them or at least don't get chewed out by the techie crowd for it. I've learned that IE users as a whole are actually a different kind of user altogether with different needs and competency levels than are users of other browsers and I'm talking about those users as a whole, not just the ones working on corporate networks. That considered, I think IE has done a great job of walking the line between keeping up with the pace of the web and serving those users.

This is all coming from a reformed IE hater. I learned that in most cases the browser wasn't the problem, it was my laziness or lack of skill that was. That was hard to admit. To all the people thinking of dropping support for IE or hating on it as its so easy and trendy to do, I'd tell you to really give it a shot and learn how to support it. You'll be a better developer for it and you'll find it's not as bad as it was when you swore it off all those years ago.

Edit: Spelling and brevity (tried my best to shorten this, sorry)