I agree with your take on IE, in fact I setup FF as the default browser in all my machines... I just got a new Laptop at work Tuesday this week and the first thing I did, after setting up the network connection of course, was to install the latest verision of FF.
My other Laptop has FF, IE & Opera, I use the others just to ensure that the thin clients my company builds look correct in all 3 browsers... we have a policy of coding for commonality... We do not support custom code for specific browsers, and we talk our customers out of when they ask...
Customers like the "cool" things may be done on some browsers, but when they realize the added cost of coding that way, and the loss of market exposure by introducing atrificial limitations, they usually don't feel it is worth the real costs to do it... they usually agree to a standards compliant, similar / functionally compatable method.
I use an editor with good text highlighting, color coding, and code completion for several langauges, including CSS, HTML, Java, JSP, PHP, Perl, C, C++ etc... It is extensible so I can add more if I need to...
It has 2 preview options, 1 previews in a pane in the application but uses the PC's browser engine to do the rendering... the other launches the browser separately loading the code... it does this even if you haven't saved it yet, which is a cool feature... once it looks right in your preferred browser you can save and then launch manually into any other browser, of course...
The first thing I do when I get a code file that was wirtten with poor format is to remove all the tabs... by selecting all the text and pushing shift+tab until everything is flush to the left... then I reformat the code while I read it, so I 1) understand the code completely and 2) fully understand the layout and placement of each part...
When I am done with my first read through, the page is format the way I prefer...
As for old machines, if they have old PCs they may have old browsers, if they have old browsers, they won't have the default IE JS blocking function....
I worked with a customer who is a MAJOR insurance/financial market leader... can't say names... they have about 15,000 PCs in their main business offices alone... They wanted to upgrade their thin client applications to my latest versions... BUT, the deal was eventually postponed indefinitely, because their machines are STILL Windows 98.... They can't even use the modern browsers... They started a plan to upgrade, but that plan was going to take several years to complete the upgrade alone.... They should be done late this year or early next year... THEN, I can talk to them again about moving ahead with the upgrade of my systems....
They still had 640x480 on 14" screens all over the place... But that is an extreme case... MOST companies I deal with are using larger than 1024x768, most have a minimum of 1280x1024... I am set to 1680 x 1050 on my laptop... But I always run my tests through 640x480 upto 1280x768... If you want things to look the best for 90% of the market, code for 800x600 and center it... the bigger browsers will just havce varying amounts of border space on the right and left of the content area... which is usually a visually acceptable, if not appealing way...
On my screen right now, this web site has about 4 inches of light-grey on each side of the site content... it doesn't look too bad
