It seems more and more of my sentences recently start "Fucking IE wouldn't do _______."

I spent last night re-working the 3 Memestreams recommendation bookmarklets into a single bookmarklet. It's a little clumsy to have 3, they don't all do the same thing or present the same UI, and there's a bug when selecting text inside of a frame. So I get going and quickly create a better one. Problems with IE quickly develop:

1- You cannot drag "javascript:" bookmarks onto the toolbar if you have IE6+XPSP2 for security reasons. Ok, I'm on broad so far, but a prompt would have been nice instead of a flat denial. To be able to drag bookmarklets, you have to add the site to the list of trusted sites! This is a huge jump in what a site can and cannot do and a good example of how Microsoft is too coarse with their security settings. There should be a prompt to temporarily add a bookmarklet. I should not have to drastically and permanently elevate a site's trust to do this.

2- IE's JavaScript debugger sucks big time. Even the advanced version. Oh my kingdom for full blown Firebug in IE.

3- IE limits the size of a "javascript:" link to 508 characters! This makes having advanced bookmarklets for IE very annoying. Instead the bookmarklet has to bootstrap a larger JavaScript file by dynamically creating a <SCRIPT SRC="http://site.com/more.js">. But this is actually a privacy violation, because the HTTP request for the larger JavaScript file will have a referer (sic) header with the webpage the person is invoking the bookmarklet on! For Memestreams that's not as big of a problem, because you were about to tell Memestreams what URL you were looking at anyway. However there are many other types of bookmarklets where this could be very bad.

Now to be fair, fucking Firefox! It allows you to have multiple pieces of text selected on a page at the same time. For example, I could have text selected in the regaulr page, in multiple textboxes and text fields, and in multiple frames and iframes. From a bookmarklet point of view this makes it tough to know what text the user really cares about. The existing bookmarklet concatenates all the text together which is probably not what most people want.