It isn't surprising that IE still sucks. In part, it sucks for the same reason that Safari sucks, which is updates (or lack thereof). Google Chrome, when it was first released, was a crappy browser with an excellent update and installation infrastructure. But that's not the whole story.<p>All the little tweaks that have gone into Chrome have been through two versions of public testing in Chromium and other varieties, and they are mature. Even better, they come from an open-source ecosystem, where innovations aren't driven by corporate needs. Google Chrome absolutely sucks for some corporate applications, in some really simple areas.<p>Try slip printing from Google Chrome. It won't work. Internet Explorer on the other hand isn't just a browser, it's an infrastructure. One that is tightly integrated into the OS and where you can override everything. In the mid-2000s, one didn't see a lot of alternatives to either Firefox or Firefox, but the number of alternative shells to IE, some of which were even popular, were overwhelming. More than that, an incredible number of applications actually had IE running underneath, for whatever reasons. Usually to display information, such as a help browser, or to provide some way of integrating one's application with the WWW.<p>And that is the problem with Internet Explorer. It was never designed for add-ons. It was designed to be an add-on. It was never designed to be updated, it was designed to be integrated. It was never designed to have excellent JavaScript, it was designed to have excellent integration into things like DirectX and even AJAX.<p>There is a reason that IE was ahead, and still is in many ways. IE doesn't suck considering what it is. It may suck for the thing it says on the tin that it's being used for, but there's no reason not to use Chrome for web browsing. Internet Explorer may be a sucky browser, but it's some pretty good infrastructure as it happens. IE is plumbing, Chrome is something else entirely. And IE happens to be the only kind of plumbing out there in the real marketplace. It may be a curse, but there is no better alternative for many of the things it can do.