Why I hate IE

I simply can't understand why is it that this don't work...

var Utils = new Object();
Utils.byId = function( id ) {
if( document.all ) {
  return document.all[ id ];
 }
 return document.getElementById( id );
}

It is just a utility function which returns me an element by its id attribute. Nothing special. But then... There is a line saying:

panorama = Utils.byId( "panorama" );

It works. Well, it worked in Firefox and Opera. But in IE, there was an error saying something like: object doesn't have that property... I can't remember now (I'm on my Ubuntu linux PC now). It took me half an hour of experiments before I found the error. The error was the word var. The line:

var panorama = Utils.byId( "panorama" );

don't work without the "var".

When I was studying Javascript, in the manual it was said that if I use var for declaring variables -- they were local variables. Without var they are global variables. Since panorama in my javascript is a global variable, I decided to delete the "var". But IE didn't like it.

Why?