What is the first thing that comes to your mind when you think about Microsoft Internet Explorer? Lack of Web Standards support? ActiveX exploits? Internet Explorer has suffered a fate similar to that of Microsoft Windows. That is, we all associate Windows with crashes, yet more recent versions of Windows aren't particularly crashy. In fact, I know a guy who swears that Mac OS X is actually more likely to crash than Windows XP or Vista (of course he's lying). Similarly, recent versions of Internet Explorer have good standards support and better security than previous versions, yet nobody associates Internet Explorer with these attributes. One attribute we do not associate with Internet Explorer in particular is innovation. However, at least in this regard, we may be doing it injustice.
Before I tell you why I think that is the case, I feel that I need to clarify that I'm actually a Firefox user and have been since before it went final. Not an avid Firefox user (there are things I don't like about it), but reasonably happy.

Alpha blending

Internet Explorer's late introduction of proper translucent PNG support was (and to some degree still is) somewhat of an annoyance. However, Internet Explorer had support for "flat" alpha blending through CSS filters for a long time. Actually long before similar features showed up in other browsers. Nowadays, most browsers support the "opacity" property which is likely to become an official standard with CSS3. Most browsers, except Internet Explorer. I could point out the irony in this, but do I really have to?

Text effects

Look everybody, Safari supports the CSS3 property "text-shadow". How awesome is that! Well, I always thought drop shadows were kinda lame, but then again I'm not a designer. Of course Internet Explorer has supported drop shadows and all kinds of text effects for quite some time. Admittedly, the drop shadows in Internet Explorer are not nearly as sexy as the ones in Safari and they are built on proprietary CSS extensions, but it's the thought that counts, right?

Inline frames

For the longest time, Internet Explorer was the only browser to support iframes. In fact, iframes started as a proprietary extension to HTML which later was adopted by the W3C and incorporated into the HTML4 standard. The use of iframes has declined over that past couple of years, but they're still invaluable in web applications for asynchronous file uploads, HTTP streaming, widget isolation, etc.

Rich-text editing

The unfinished specification of the HTML5 standard mentions an HTML attribute called "contentEditable" that turns any HTML element into what is essentially a richt-text editor. Internet Explorer already supports this attribute as do most other browsers. Why does Internet Explorer support it? Because Microsoft invented it. In-browser richt-text editing is now commonplace and many web applications heavily depend on it, but support for contentEditable (or its predecessor "designMode") wasn't available outside of IE until quite recently. Interestingly, Mozilla as well as other browser implementers chose to adopt Microsoft's somewhat quirky JavaScript API for contentEditable rather than rolling their own.

Asynchronous HTTP requests

This is a big one! When Microsoft released Internet Explorer 5, they silently added a new ActiveX component to it called XMLHttpRequest. XMLHttpRequest or XHR for short was used by Microsoft's Outlook Web Access to provide a more desktop-like user experience. Today, ten years later, XHR has found wide adoption as part of the "technology" that is now commonly referred to as Ajax. While Microsoft had initially implemented XHR as an ActiveX object, Mozilla and later others went down a different path and made XHR a first-class "native" JavaScript object. In an interesting case of "cross-fertilization", Microsoft later added native XHR to Internet Explorer as well. XMLHttpRequest is also a candidate for W3C standardization.

Graphics

What do Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera have in common? They all support an HTML5 element called "canvas" that adds graphics support to HTML and more specifically to JavaScript. Did I miss any browsers in that list? Oh right, Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer does not support the canvas element which is unfortunate, especially because Internet Explorer supports a different graphics API and has done so for almost ten years. I'm talking about VML or Vector Markup Language. VML is an XML-based language to produce vector graphics, similar to SVG. SVG of course is natively supported by all the beforementioned browsers except Internet Explorer. Oh, the tragedy.

Font embedding

Most designers as they go through design school are taught about the significance of fonts, about different font styles, about serif and sans-serif fonts and things of that nature. Okay, I'm talking out of my ass here: I have no idea what designers are taught in design school, but I'm assuming that fonts play their part. Either way, I can say from my personal experience that when you tell first-time web designers that they can only use certain "web-safe" fonts in their designs, they're not particularly happy. Unwilling to accept these limitations, designers often feel compelled to put text into images or, even worse, Flash movies. Now here's a crazy idea: wouldn't it be nice if we could somehow embed the fonts used by a particular website into the website itself? As it turns out, recent versions of Firefox, Safari and Opera support this feature through the CSS3 rule "@font-face". Internet Explorer on the other hand has supported this since 1997. The catch? Internet Explorer only supports embedding of special rights managed font files while Firefox and the likes only support embedding of un-managed fonts. Why the rights-management? So that if you embed commercial fonts, Adrian Frutiger doesn't sue yo ass.

Microsoft's decision to suspend all Internet Explorer development after the release of Internet Explorer 6 has turned out to be a fatal mistake. Internet Explorer 6, while it may seem old and dated today, was actually on the cutting edge when it was released. Eight years later, Internet Explorer has lost significant market share and has gone from innovating to playing catch-up. That's a real bummer because Microsoft had all the right ideas about dynamic HTML and web applications. In our wonderful capitalist world, innovation is often driven by competition. When Internet Explorer 6 was released, it quickly gained a market share of over 90%. The end of competition meant the end of innovation. Now that the competition is back, so is innovation. Microsoft isn't on the forefront of it, but who knows where this is going. As long as I'm on the receiving end of this new, much more civilized browser war, I'm all for it.