>They need to learn a lesson about wantonly pushing proprietary technology when perfectly fine standardized solutions already exist. I suspect they haven't learned anything though.
I think they did learn. Keep in mind that back in IE4/5 era when most of that stuff was created, they were competing against Netscape 4.
If they did learn anything, it has been a slow process. The <canvas> tag for example, was introduced in Safari 1.3 and has been supported in Firefox since 1.5, Opera since version 9, and in all versions of Chrome. Contrast that with IE. The <canvas> tag is not supported by IE until version 9. If you want to do any cool <canvas> graphics in versions before 9, you'll have to use something like ExplorerCanvas at http://code.google.com/p/explorercanvas/, which of course mean more conditional IE comments in you HTML, and more pain for web developers.
I think they did learn. Keep in mind that back in IE4/5 era when most of that stuff was created, they were competing against Netscape 4.