IE - the crazy aunt in the attic

The ArcterJournal lets slip a great rant on the current state of IE, and where that leaves developers:

Lets be honest here. There won't be any new updates to IE for a very long time will there? It's been said so many times, the IE renderer supports a billion languages, versions, and testing it in the wiz-bang microsoft test facility takes years for a single change. Are the changes required to give proper standards support coming anytime soon? I really doubt it, and that makes me sad, because it causes more work for me, the people I work with, and makes our products not nearly as good as they could be. Hell, even saying "support only IE" won't work because writing code for IE 6 (windows) still varies greatly compared to IE 5.X (latest on OS/9 and OS/X). You guys almost did us a favor by not supporting IE on the Mac anymore, which would have meant we could write for IE6/Mozilla, which would have been a bit easier, but later reversed the decision and re-supported IE 5 on the Mac.

So I ask again, how is the IE team working to make sure their browser is the best?

There's also that helpful way they decided to stop supporting the old Netscape plugin API, and instead decided to invent a new Active/X based scheme - breaking a bunch of code and lowering security in one fell swoop. Sigh...