I knew I was going to find a way out of the IE mess. A little skeptical about what I’d be able to find, I Googled reusing xmlhttprequest objects in ie and hit the jackpot on the first try. Here’s the solution, which I got from Pavan Keely’s blog.

Currently, my custom AJAX class works perfectly. The annoying aspect of my search was that Microsoft didn’t have anything on it — in fact, their documentation has been upgraded for IE 7 (which sports the same window.XMLHttpRequest object as Firefox).

Hopefully, as more and more developers move towards Web 2.0, the browsers will cooperate more and more. I know Firefox lifted the window.ActiveXObject(‘XMLHTTP’) concept from IE and made it into one of the core objects of the browser, but it’s still good. I’m impressed by Microsoft’s humility of late.