I definitely appreciate the history of IE, the advancements and innovation around IE 4 and 5 were very impressive and helped to shape the Internet into what it is today, I think the problem is the time from IE 5.5 until now.
I worry more about Microsoft's commitment as a whole to the project, not just the members of the team. I am sure the team that originally built IE was very passionate about it, but after Netscape was vanquished it was no longer a priority for the company. Not until Firefox did MS decide to put more focus back on IE. I don't worry about MS being able to add some awesome innovations and features to IE, I worry about what will happen if they vanquish Firefox... how can we trust a company who has a huge interest in keeping things on the desktop to advance the largest challenge to that platform? (Although they are doing a good job with ASP.NET 2.0, the best argument against smart clients)
That being said I look forward to seeing what the IE team can come up with; here would be my list of must-haves for 7.0:
1) Fix outstanding rendering bugs. 2) Better solution for using IE from managed code. 3) Better extensions model (see FireFox) 4) Place a priority on standards based development (CSS2, etc) 5) Turn off ActiveX completely. 6) No proprietary tags/script/etc.
Of course, all of these are meaningless without an answer to the “big” question.
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