Testing out canvas5 for facebook game (so there is a reason people keep on using flash)

Have never done that much database/php stuff, but was currious if you could make a game using javascript/canvas rather than flash.
this seemed fine till trying to get Internet Explorer to work, in which case i would like to think flash works as canvas, even with various script emulations, has rather poor canvas support.
so anyway, tested it out and hit a dead end, to continue this project, would need to port it to flash, make a php and database backend, as well as ballance/ improve content.
or just move onto a new project.