What if this is as good as it gets?

I have a suspicion that they will focus heavily on ie because of windows phone 7 - they desperately need developers, and will do whatever they can to get them on their new mobile platform, be it native or web-apps. (this all relies on the desktop and mobile versions of ie sharing a codebase.

Microsoft is becoming less and less of a gatekeeper with the rise of Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. In 2-3 years when the next "version" of HTML gains the public eye, they will not have a stranglehold on the web. I'd be more worried about Apple or Google than MS (as silly as it may sound now).

Microsoft is going to keep caring because the browser has become the most important application on a computer.

If Internet Explorer is garbage then sure the average user could go download a third party browser but they could also just jump ship to a non-Microsoft operating system or device.

The trend over the last couple of years is users just wanting something that works out of the box and if Microsoft wants to keep those users on Windows or other MS devices then IE is going to have to stay competitive.

Hopefully, in time, people would end up just installing Firefox or Chrome.

Is this what-if really worth thinking about? If and when that time comes whoever is using IE can just switch to one of the half-dozen other browsers on their platform.

It's not as good as it gets for one simple reason. Mobile. Ms's policy when behind is embrace and extend. They are almost behind in browser share and are currently not in the running with win phone 7 (that could change rapidly as their offering is on a technical level in the running). In order to compete on mobile they will have to bring their browser upto webkit levels. They will do this as if they lose mobile they become irrelevant in the next 10 years. Mobile is the new desktop and desktop client + office is their bread and butter

I have very little hope that IE 9 will change anything about the IE problem. What we need is continuous releases of IE like we see it with other browsers. I don't see anything in Ms's behavior that indicates that that's what will be happening once IE 9 is released. It will probably take years until we see IE 10 and updates to IE 9 will only be minor bug fixes.

Some of the posts here show that people think that Microsoft loses it's dominance if they don't deliver a better browser. It's in Microsoft's best interest to have the average user use the worst browser possible. Yes, it's true Microsoft has missed out on the Internet. But by providing users with a great browser doesn't make this problem smaller, it make sit bigger. For example Google Docs and GMail become more of an alternative to Outlook and Office, if you have a good browser. That's not in Microsoft's interest. So the bets strategy for Microsoft is to release a browser that's only as good as necessary to keep the majority of users from moving away from it, but at the same time makes web development as hard as possible. As someone else here pointed out. MS implemented all the big prominent buzz wordy stuff like Canvas, rounded corners, etc. All the features even non-developers might have heard about and will make them think they are using a great modern browser that has all the awesome flashy stuff they read about. However, many things that actually would help taking web development to a next level like web sockets, workers and esp. the app cache aren't there. I am pretty sure MS could have implemented that stuff if hey had really wanted to, but that would have supported the Internet, in which MS is very little invested, too much and weakened their Desktop apps even more. So nothing will be happening until everyone's unhappiness with MS's IE effort has reached a critical point again and even then we will only get a minimum of what MS thinks they have to give us to please the crowd.

Biten once twice shy. They have been burnt badly by ignoring internet for a long time even though they were made aware of its importance by numerous memos. GOOG and AAPL won't let them rest on the laurels of IE9.

Funny, his list of things that IE9 supports reads like a list of cool HTML5 stuff you'd want to use. The "things it doesn't support" list looks like something he made up on the spot (though clearly they're all real things that somebody has proposed putting into web browsers.)

But it's all stuff that doesn't belong in web browsers. (OK, maybe WebSockets). If it were up to me, now would be the time to actually standardize some of those things on the first list so that they work cross browser. Then we're done.