If you were smart when IE started adding features, you would analyze the feature in question before throwing your hands up and shouting about MS. For instance, XMLHttpRequest was a fricking cool innovation.
MS's problem traditionally has been that it doesn't open the spec for these sorts of things until much later, if at all. This is a tendency Google does not really share when it adds features to Chrome. For instance, before Google officially started working on Web Intents, an employee of theirs and one from Mozilla came up with different ideas for how intents should be handled. They agreed on a preliminary spec and now that spec is open for anyone to implement.
That's exactly it. If we complained about every new feature we'd still be using static pages with blink tags. Google and Firefox are teaming up to implement this features. Look at how Google went about WebGL. They had a competing plugin called O3D but when they saw O3D was working out they dropped it completely and even ported the O3D api to WebGL (which I use now since then). Microsoft of old would just have kept going (hence DirectX instead of continuing to support OpenGL).
No. Browser makers should actually innovate more. The problem with "non standard" comes only from the instances where IE does standard behavior in a completely idiosyncratic way or not at all. There are tons of interesting things that are not part of any W3C specs. Of course browser developers should be creative. But they should not, as the IE team does again and again, make a lot of proprietary extensions _instead_ of implementing the standard specs that cover the same functionality.
The fact that Mozilla are working on it alongside Google should quieten the screams, and they do also have a javascript library for IE, Safari, Chrome and FF3.
Another important difference thus far unmentioned is that IE is a browser for a single platform, and Microsoft traditionally has not done a good job in creating IE features in a cross-platform way. (I'm thinking of ActiveX specifically here.)
If a feature is led by Chrome, Firefox, or Opera you know that any native platform hooks have been designed thoughtfully to work nicely across at least the 3 major desktop platforms.
