Microsoft is not improving standards support in IE because they want to discourage the use of the browser as a platform for developing applications that are not operating system dependant. Improving support for CSS, PNG, and other standards such as Xforms, etc. would only make the browser a better application platform.
It doesn’t matter if Microsoft owns the browser market. If developers switch over to creating standards based web applications Microsoft loses control of their customers. Standards based web applications can be easily run in competing browsers and, yes, even on competing operating systems.
I disagree...
Look at Hotmail... that's an example of Microsoft's vision for web-applications 4 years ago... and Hotmail relies on CSS and DOM JavaScript for many of its functions anyway.
Microsoft has been hyping about web-applications more than you'd imagine, the MSDN Library is full of articles on the subject. 3 of the included posters in the 2003 edition are about web-applications.
But I'm convinced Microsoft will make IE7 support standards... why? Because VS 2005 supports the entire XHTML1.1 and CSS2.1 spec, even if Internet Explorer 6 doesn't. This would be wasting the VS dev team's time if they weren't going to make these features available commonplace in a short while.
See: http://www.asp.net/whidbey/whitepapers/VSWhidbeyOverview.aspx?tabindex=0&tabid=1 (scroll down to "Better Standards Support" (near the bottom... and please, no cynical remarks about "leaving the least to the last")
There was another page with more information, but I've since lost the URI
-- -David R
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