IE 9/10 are actually pretty decent. They don't have a lot of the not-quite-standards-yet bells and whistles Webkit's rapidly iterating on, but from a development standpoint I'm having to make essentially zero IE-specific hacks/fixes in those versions.

So they support the set of features that you want to use.

But in http://html5test.com/results/desktop.html they are still dead last. And you sometimes need to jump through special hoops to get that level of compatibility - for instance without a custom http header you can't get compatibility mode for intranet sites. IE 10 still lacks standard competitor features such as a nicely sandboxed private mode. (Often jokingly called "porn mode".) And, as you note, competitors like Webkit are rapidly moving the bar for the future.

In no way is this "on par with". "No longer horribly unacceptable compared to" I could grant you. But not "on par with".

> IE 10 still lacks standard competitor features such as a nicely sandboxed private mode.

Not true. This was included in IE9.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/internet-explorer/product...

> IE 9/10 are actually pretty decent. They don't have a lot of the not-quite-standards-yet bells and whistles Webkit's rapidly iterating on

IE9 is missing a lot of neat stuff which others have had for quite some time (limited CORS or D&D, no text-shadow, offline apps, transitions, placeholders, gradients, animations, xhr2, classlist, History API, typed arrays, async scripts, strict mode, webworkers, file & filereader API, 3D transforms, websockets, flexbox, requestAnimationFrame, datalist, page visibility, forms 2, ...)

IE10 is significantly better, but still behind (mostly due to no webgl and fullscreen)

IE 10 is decent. But, unfortunately, Microsoft still hasn't leaned its lesson and has no plans to support WebGL. This just means IE will trail behind once again.