On contrary, "we" want nothing of the sort. Maybe those too young to remember the advances made from IE4 through IE6, those may not understand how Microsoft set up how you and I use the web today. You seem to be missing the point. It's not Microsoft's job to make GMail work on your phone or linux; _however_, Microsoft's pushing the buck (even if proprietary) did push the browser market forward leaps and bounds. GMail hinges heavily on a little technology we know as XMLHTTP. Take a guess who championed the tech; take a guess how long before standards zealots published a specification draft. (MS '99; W3C '06)

Redmond has been sleeping, no doubt. But that is neither here nor there. It's refreshing to see other browser teams giving the IE team a run for their money and whipping them into shape -- they've been needing that for almost 10 years, finally getting them off their laurels. Competition is the best part of the space, and that should include innovative APIs (not yet standard) that us engineers can exploit to make our applications better, faster, or stronger. I'm certainly not going to wait for some standards committee to deliberate for 8 years over some monolithic spec that every browser will get wrong anyhow, as history has shown.