Well, sort of. Once again, Microsoft failed to deliver on their promises. The beta is publicly available, but in order to download it, you need an MSDN subscription, which costs at least $199. I'm certainly not paying $199 for a beta version of a web browser that will likely be a disappointment in and of itself. Furthermore, there are reports that the beta is corrupted. Great job, guys.

Reading through the technology overview, it looks like things will be just as I expected: Microsoft did the absolute minimum required for them to act like they're meeting our needs. They added support for alphatransparent PNGs, but it still doesn't support gamma correction, so the colors will still be off. They fixed a few problems with the CSS box model, but considering how reluctant they seem to be about saying exactly what they improved in CSS support, it's likely that Internet Explorer will still be keeping us in the dark ages. They don't mention any improvements in DOM support, so I think it's safe to assume that the DOM event model is still almost completely unsupported. They didn't mention whether or not they added correct support for the HTML object element, or whether or not they support for XHTML yet. If it wasn't clear yet, it should be clear now: Microsoft doesn't care about web developers. I don't care how much they say they do, they simply never deliver.

They added some basic tab support, RSS support, and a couple other things just so it will appear to the average Joe that Internet Explorer has everything Firefox has. That's probably the cruelest part of it all. Rather than actually give the web developers what they want like they claim to be doing, they are simply making it harder for us to get the message across to the average Joe just how bad Internet Explorer is, because the average Joe doesn't grasp intangible things like standards support. If, at a glance (which is all most people tend to give alternative browsers), it looks like Internet Explorer at least touches on all of the basic visible features of Firefox, most people will stick with Internet Explorer without a second thought, and the Internet will continue to suffer for it. Hopefully the ugly new interface will at least put a foul taste in the users' mouths. (Who the heck put the menu bar on the third toolbar down?)

In a nutshell, I think Microsoft should be ashamed of what they are putting out, and the manner in which they are putting it out. If you read the comments on the official blog post about it, you'll see that there is pretty consistent disappointment here. After five years, Microsoft owes the web development community more than this.