Internet Explorer.... The modern Edsel? Don't write it off yet ;)

First off, I use Google Chrome V4 now and am a recent convert from Microsoft's Internet Explorer(IE8). I have noticed a lot of IE bashing lately particularly related to standards support. I find this rather ironic since most of the things mentioned as non-standard are items that IE implemented as far back as IE3 but because the standard didn't exist they created their own. Things like opacity and shadows that everyone hypes in CSS3 were all working fine in IE3!!! Things still being worked on like transitions in CSS have been in IE since beta3. HTML5 items like databases and custom tags were all part of IE3 & 4. My demo site that was made exclusively for IE4+ used these and many other cool capabilities that were not available in any other browser. That is when all the competition disappeared and IE got slower and sloppier with every release.
Now I see many people writing IE off. I do not recommend this for business at this time! Microsoft is too large a company to just roll over and let this happen. Remember when Netscape said the same thing... Netscape was going to be the browser... Woke up Microsoft who then crushed Netscape. IE9 is going to reduce the complaints by being faster and more standards compliant and by IE11 I suspect they will be in the battle again, maybe even dominating. I also think the versions will be coming faster now there is competition.
Now on the other and... It would make sense to me for Microsoft to totally drop the browser and let others build them to run on Windows systems. After all they don't make any money on the browser. It would be quite an achievement to put something like Firefox on all Microsoft systems(I can't see Chrome with the Google/Microsoft wars ongoing).
This war really doesn't matter so don't invest to much into any specific browser. Try to go with browser neutral code or at least code that degrades gracefully like CSS.