News.com: "As part of the OS (operating system), IE will continue to evolve, but there will be no future standalone installations. IE6 SP1 is the final standalone installation," Countryman said in the the May 7 interview.

IE will continue to evolve? It might start evolving again, but I have not seen much evolution in browsers technology for the last 4 or 5 years. Browsers have barely been fixed, but since CSS, back in 1998, we have not seen significant new features.

And also if the latest releases from Microsoft are supporting CSS almost as they are supposed to, there are still no authoring tools to take full advantage of this new technology.

I've seen oustanding examples of what can be achieved with CSS, but all of them have been authored using text editors. It's like CG back in the '70s or Linotype applications before the desktop publishing revolution.

We've been asking for some basic features to manage rich text within browsers for years, but still there's no mainstream implementation of a technology that does not seem rocket science and that with CMS and weblogs booming would be welcomed but many users (no, Microsoft's one just doesn't cut it).

I don't care if Microsoft is willing to release their browser as a standalone application or as part of their operating system, Apple has been doing that for a while: no new cool applications unless you are using the lastes version of Mac OS. So what? It's their market and they will get away with this. What I would like to see is some real innovation, new features, new tools, not just bug fixes.