First. It's great news to see Microsoft going full steam with IE9. The Direct 2d + subpixel rendering is some fresh air in the IE camp that is otherwise playing catchup with the competition.

 

I follow the IE blog since IE8 alpha and I can say that whatever Microsoft do, there will always be someone to trash the efforts being done.

 

But IE is still the dominant browser. There is a responsibility by Microsoft to deliver something on par with other browsers, particularly Chrome. Microsoft made a great move with IE8 making it standard compliant by default instead of opt-in. IE9 has to score better : acid3 + html5, javascript perf (congrat on what is accomplished thus far), ECMAScript Harmony support would be the level bar. For my part, I wish that XSLT 2.0 + Xpath 2.0 be supported.

 

Go Ms Go !