> "User agents should present this hint to the user, after having stripped line breaks from it, when the element's value is the empty string and the control is not focused"
Yes, I am now saying the behavior is wrong and goes against user experience. Since IE is going by specifications then I agree my dislike for it in this instance is likely misdirected. On the other hand, it seems the other browsers saw the spec and rightfully disagreed with this behavior; so I'm back to disliking IE.
> On the other hand, it seems the other browsers saw the spec and rightfully disagreed with this behavior
The w3 spec almost certainly postdates the browser vendors decision on what they would implement (and probably the actual implementation -- all the meaningful work on HTML goes on in the WHATWG living standard, the W3 spec is a frozen backward-looking interpretation of that, but even the WHATWG spec is probably a result of the vendor's decision on what to implement, rather than the decisions being based on the spec.) It probably says what it says precisely because that is the level of commonality of behavior between major vendors, with non-Microsoft vendors also displaying the placeholder when the field is empty but focused.
EDIT: Note also that the WHATWG spec, at least, specifies additional behavior if the user agent does not normally display the value when focused ("If a user agent normally doesn't show this hint to the user when the control is focused, then the user agent should nonetheless show the hint for the control if it was focused as a result of the autofocus attribute, since in that case the user will not have had an opportunity to examine the control before focusing it.") [0]