Websocket has been coming for about 12 months. Most of the spec was sorted out months and months ago.

Whether or not you are serious, indeed they should have something in the works for a standard whose draft specification is dated today.

I think the bigger issue is that Microsoft doesn't bother adhering to standards;

Or they make up their own standards when there are already perfectly good standards that provide the same functionality;

Or they implement part of a standard, but certain stuff is completely wrong, and when it is pointed out, they don't do anything about it.

And then they force you to conform their arbitrary non-standard stuff, because they can bully you with their 70% market share.

This isn't just about being slow, its about their course history of being slow AND maliciously protectionist AND incompetent.

And they should get ditched if they continue to behave in such a manner.

Historically, Microsoft has put forth their own standards well before anybody else, only to see the official "Standard" be written differently by a 3rd party.

DOM, CSS, Box Model, Events, SVG, and a bunch of other things they did before anybody else (in a straightforward and reverse-engineerable way) were ignored by later groups who put together slightly incompatible "standards", some of which had no reference implementation. NN6, for example, was out for a full year before it implemented the W3C Events model that the Netscape team had proposed (which of course didn't exactly match the reference implementation that IE5 had in place 2 years earlier).

It's only recently that the Standards folks have managed to spec out things that the IE group hadn't done yet.