[InclinedPlane]

I think there's more to it than that. Somehow Google managed to build a top tier, highly standards compliant browser "from scratch" in a short matter of time. Much less time than IE development has not been stagnant, for example. And yet the work and the decisions of the IE team continue to disappoint. They have made some good choices and improved IE a great deal, but they are catching up slower than the other browsers (FF, Chrome, Safari, Opera) are pulling away.

More so, there doesn't appear to be any significant sense of urgency in the IE team related to just how far behind they are. Firefox has revolutionized its Javascript engine, massively increased standards compliance, and added support for next generation html5 and css3 features. We'll be lucky if IE9 manages to support css 2.1 correctly, let alone implements html5, css3, or comes out with a competitive javascript engine.

Microsoft seems to be pretty complacent in regards to IE because it still dominates marketshare. However, the decline of Myspace shows just how quickly marketshare in the online world can change.

[rbranson]

Hardly from scratch at all. The base work was done by the KDE team as KHTML many years ago and then Apple put the finishing 50% in with WebKit. By the time Google came along, WebKit (aka Safari) was already a force in the market. Google's biggest contribution thus far to the current browser wars was the V8 engine, which significantly raised the bar for JavaScript performance.

[InclinedPlane]

You may have noticed the quotes I put around "from scratch" in an effort to forestall responses just such as yours. Yes, I realize that they built on a substantial amount of existing work, but every project does. The point is that they did nothing that nobody else could do, there's nothing stopping MS from using WebKit in IE9. The fact that a relatively small number of total developer-hours compared to the efforts having been expended for development of IE7 and IE8 can translate into a top-tier web browser is significant.

[rbranson]

The Internet is such a terrible medium for communications subtleties. I agree though... but imagine how that would look from a PR perspective. Microsoft is, essentially, the anti-thesis of open source.