Originally Posted By: hybrid8

There are a lot of proprietary web-based tools that should just be implemented as stand-alone applications, which can still be built using the resources of the specific browser they're intended to run on. Lots of intranet stuff for instance. A lot of stuff that would do far better not to be encumbered with the generic browser controls that can mess up their usage anyway.

Quite. I spent 8 years working on complex Intranet apps that not only targeted just IE, but also typically targeted a single version of IE.

That sounds horrible at first, but it did mean we got to write lots of rich AJAXy Intranet web apps before AJAX as a concept even existed, because we got to use XML, XSLT and XMLHTTP for years before they arrived in the other browsers.
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