Internet Explorer and one way to make it better

Any serious web developer uses Firefox as their main browser for development, period. Sure, you can argue with me, but, I know this is the popular view and I certainly agree with it. Why is Firefox so good for development? Is it the cool logo? The Open Source idealism? Fuck no! It is the freaking plug-ins. There are so many good ones for Firefox and the browser renders pages with very few quirks, so, as a dev you are shooting yourself in the foot if you use anything else. This can also be said for web application security auditing, especially when you are black boxing (i.e. hacking). But this post is not to list out all the virtues of Firefox it is to talk about the black scourge that is Internet Explorer. There are a few reasons that IE blows.
1) Horrible rendering with many browser bugs (HTML & JavaScript)
2) Very limited development tools
3) Hard to write plug-ins (COM come on!)
4) Not OS-independent (alright, that is a stretch)

At my current day gig I have to use IE, so, I have to deal. But it has me thinking. It can't be that hard to write a IE plug-in that takes the major FireFox plug-ins and make them work under IE. It is something I have been mulling over for the past month.

I hope to take on this task in the next month or two and when I do expect some blog posts on the journey and hopefully a plug-in that will allow for this.