The Register, while talking about the MS-AOL settlement:

Neglected by Microsoft for several years, the browser was recently described here as looking “more tired than a shemale street walker in San Francisco’s Tenderloin on a Saturday night”. In comparison with more modern browsers such as Opera, noted Ashlee Vance, “it’s just a rectangle”.

What’s wrong with being a rectangle exactly? (I like my browser to be a nice, colorless, inconspicuous rectangle, thankyouverymuch — in fact, one reason I like Win2000′s IE6 to XP’s is the monochrome toolbar). Also, aesthetic considerations aside,
there are some other reasons:

• IE is way ahead of the pack with its rendering engine — try viewing this XSL-styled page on Opera or Mozilla.
  Mozilla’s Transformiix still doesn’t do disable-output-escaping, and
  Opera is hopeless at anything XML.
• A working History bar with different views (apart from IE, only Phoenix
  gets this right. Opera 7 doesn’t even come close)
• Stable. Crack jokes all you like, but I routinely keep about 30 IE windows
  open and expect them not to crash (I generally start windows with applets or
  OCXs in a different process in case they crash — and I haven’t seen IE crash
  on a plain (D)HTML page for ages). On the other hand, Opera stability is a
  joke — open up more than 10 tabs and watch it suck memory and crash. Mozilla
  is probably a little better, but still not as good as IE.

Sure, pop-up blocking would be good to have. I’m not finicky about tabs.
Fine-grained control over applets and OCXs executing on the page would be good,
too. On the other hand, I’m not sure I find the browser-as-writing-platform kool-aid
easy to digest, especially since all the API plumbing that would make it
possible is already there and folk are

selling web writing tools right now. What stops (say) Userland from selling
their outliner as an OCX to be used with IE? Or offering it to paying
Radio/Frontier customers?

The funny thing is, most MS teams add features (cf. Office 2000 → Office XP)
and they’re cut a new one for shipping bloatware. The IE team adds
under-the-hood features and security tweaks and bugfixes, people ask if
IE is
dead. You can’t win.

Update: Robert Scoble has a
few interesting
words on the is-IE-dead meme on his weblog.