The silence on IE8 scares me. At the moment its hell, pure hell trying to get javascript to work between IE and firefox/opera/other standard based browsers ;o. Microsoft has pretty much said screw you javascript developers by refusing to add any new javascript features to IE.
AFAIK the only real javascript language change they made was making the XMLHttpRequest a global object instead of having to use

Code:

new ActiveXObject('Microsoft.XMLHTTP');

you can now do

Code:

new XMLHttpRequest();

*claps for the IE team*

Microsoft had a chance to implement DOM3 events in IE7 but of course they are silly and don't want to conform to the standards .

Someone really needs to slap Microsoft, the IE team and the jscript team in the face and tell them to stop holding back new javascript features and help improve the web, instead of killing it

now back to IE8 what the hell are they doing with it, have they given up?, are they stalling? or are they creating the most awesome browser ever? (aka dump IE and start over ;o)

Microsoft _needs_ dump IE and do something extreme like buying opera.

Or dump IE and package firefox with windows, though I really can't see that happening

now you might be saying "but what about those crazy intranet applications which only work on IE", my answer to that is those crazy people should just keep using an old version of IE.

</rant>