News.com: Microsoft to abandon standalone IE

Microsoft is stopping development of Internet Explorer as a separate product, and future versions will come only with new operating systems. This only confirms what observers had guessed for a while. A positive way to look at it is that it might in fact revive innovation by giving more air to competitors such as Mozilla (if you remember the browsers war, it's all about "air supply.")

However, this also means that we'll have to bear with IE's inconsistencies for years, because the next Windows desktop version is still two years away, then you need another two years before its roll-out starts to make a difference (there are still people using Netscape 4 out there.) One consequence is that stylesheet-based CSS design is going to remain relatively hard, so creating web pages that look good on all platforms will still cost more money than it should. Microsoft, as a typical W3C member, doesn't respect the standards it contributes to create.

Disclosure: I used to work at Microsoft.

06/06/03 update: Jeffrey Zeldman thinks there's an upside to this situation.