IE7 Supports XMLHttpRequest Natively, My Ass

IE7 Beta 3, installed fresh. Before you ask: yeah, I made sure I had the checkbox checked for "Enable native XMLHTTP Support." So I go to check some of my code and get the following:

A Runtime Error has occurred.
Do you wish to Debug?

Line: 286
Error: 'XMLHttpRequest.prototype' is null or not an object.

Which means a detect script that used to weed out IE6's non-XMLHttpRequest support like this just fucking breaks in IE7:

if (window.XMLHttpRequest &&
   XMLHttpRequest.prototype.isPrototypeOf(someobject)) {
...
} else {
...
}

So, basically, this makes me think that they didn't port shit to a native JavaScript object. This just looks like they made an ActiveX control that runs even if you disable ActiveX.

IE cannot set events via the DOM in order to pass parameters to functions/methods

Not one of the following examples will work in IE:

anchor.setAttribute('onclick', 'doThis(' + param + ');');
anchor.onclick = 'doThis(' + param + ');';
anchor.onclick = new Function('doThis(' + param + ');');
anchor.onclick = function() { doThis(param); };
anchor['onclick'] = 'doThis(' + param + ');';
anchor['onclick'] = new Function('doThis(' + param + ');');
anchor['onclick'] = function() { doThis(param); };

If I want to dynamically write out a list of links, I have to fucking spell out the entire string rather than using DOM methods and then innerHTML my way to working code, or stick javascript:void(...); into the href. I can't define event handlers without some serious hacked-out solution, because I need to pass a parameter when it gets called.

Edited 3/5 to add: rather than post yet another comment in reply to yet another anonymous comment...any of the above will work in IE, provided you call anchor.parentNode.innerHTML = anchor.parentNode.innerHTML afterward. Yes, you must tell IE explicitly to listen to the markup contained in the page that it already knows about.

When PRE does not mean PRE

So say you have a <pre> element. Say you need to update that <pre> with new contents. This should work, right?

document.getElementById('my_special_pre').innerHTML = some_big_block;

Well, almost. True, it does replace the contents of my_special_pre with some_big_block. However...IE for some reason simply forgets to preformat the white-space. Even if you assign the new content and then explicitly tell it you really do want that block to white-space: pre; - it still can't figure out that it needs to actually listen to newlines.

Now, I would at this point guess that IE parses the XML, basically ignoring the white-space, making some_big_block a single line of text without newlines. Except this corrects the behavior:

document.getElementById('my_special_pre').innerHTML = some_big_block.replace(/\n/g, "<br />\n");

Fucking brilliant. That hurt to write, so somebody please let me you know of a better way to correct this moronic IE "quirk."

*edited for a small grammer fix.