I continue to find it ironic that Mozilla (and to a lesser extent, Google) have been pretty much continuously complaining about Microsoft/IE "holding back the Web", with a lot of people in agreement, when MS/IE's lack of support for the latest standards (not authored by them, naturally) is what keeps the former from having too much power over the Web as a whole. Imagine the company with huge browser marketshare rejecting all proposals to add new and more complex things to the standard, or refusing to implement them.

If you want free, open systems, competition needs to be easy.

By MS/IE "holding back the Web", it's actually making it easier for alternative browsers to compete, and I think that's a good thing. Consider that the non-mainstream alternatives like NetSurf and Dillo are probably at a similar level of Web standards support as IE6/7.

Now that I think about it, I actually miss the Internet when the combination of XP and IE6 ruled --- certainly some sites tried to push the boundaries, but a lot of the rest remained "un-appified" and usable from other simple browsers too, with a bigger emphasis on content...