First of all, I am aware of this question:
and specifically best answer therein, http://emilsblog.lerch.org/2009/07/javascript-hacks-using-xhr-to-load.html.
So accessing binary data from Javascript using Firefox (and later versions of Chrome which actually seem to work too; don't know about Opera). So far so good. But I am still hoping to find a way to access binary data with a modern IE (ideally IE 6, but at least IE 7+), without using VB. It has been mentioned that XHR.messageBody would not work (if it contains zero bytes), but I was wondering if this might have been resolved with newer versions; or if there might be alternate settings that would allow simple binary data access.
Specific use case for me is that of accessing data returned by a web service that is encoded using a binary data transfer format (including byte combinations that are not legal in UTF-8 encoding).