[KuraFire]

“but until they demonstrate they've changed their ways,”

Which is exactly what they’ve been doing the past two releases. IE7 was a sincere attempt at catching up in the CSS department and get with the program on web standards adherence/compliance. IE8 was a sincere attempt at getting up to speed with the JavaScript side of things. IE9 is a sincere attempt at getting up to speed with HTML5 and CSS3, and whilst they aren’t yet including some of the things we may personally wish to see most (e.g. CSS Transitions), claiming they have yet to “change their ways” is nothing more than an unhelpful attempt at putting Microsoft in the “evil“ corner.

Microsoft themselves have long been trying to get people to upgrade from IE6 and Windows XP. Sure, part of that is just for their own business purposes, but at the same time they honestly want to help the web forward—the current state of affairs hurts them more than us, these days. There is no chance they’ll ever go back to dominating the industry like they did in the late ’90s and early ’00s, because of the steady “re-mergence” of the Mac and the myriad mobile platforms we’re collectively shifting to. All they can do now is to provide a browser on the Windows platform that isn’t so far behind on things that it becomes a compelling reason for people to leave Windows itself behind. And to do that, they know they have to play along in the standards game, which has long taken over the industry.