> Microsoft allowed Internet Explorer to completely stagnate
IIRC, after the legal madness, there were some major shakeups. Not least of which included the entire IE team being settlement-forced into other positions in the company (many went on to what would become WPF, which should be obvious if you've ever seen XAML). I don't envy the post-IE6 group, having to take a huge codebase, maintain backwards compatability, and staff an _entirely_ new team.
But, take that with a grain of salt, as I was in DevDiv at the time this happened. I certainly had some peers who had been part of the legal wrangling and were under mandatory document retention the entire time they worked for me.
There might have been a team but it seems like all that team was created to do was to maintain the IE6 codebase. That is pretty much stagnated development. At the time Microsoft was essentially giving web developers the middle finger because really, what were our alternatives?
Why did IE7 ever get released? Simple, because of Phoenix, aka Firebird, aka Firefox, aka competition. Without that I doubt Microsoft would have ever updated IE or bothered to rewrite IEs rendering engine (which didn't work well until maybe IE9). If not for the new competition into the browser field we would probably still be asking them to fix alpha transparency in PNG files.
So what I'm getting at is, they could have started IE7 anytime they wanted to after IE6 shipped with XP. Stagnation because of team shakeup is just an excuse. I doubt IE7 would have taken that long if Firefox was released right when XP came out.
AFAIK they did add user features during that time like a pop-up blocker (look at the Longhorn 4000 builds and XP SP2). But the rendering engine and most of the other things that matter to web developers was I think left unchanged except for minor bugfixes.
IIRC, after the legal madness, there were some major shakeups. Not least of which included the entire IE team being settlement-forced into other positions in the company (many went on to what would become WPF, which should be obvious if you've ever seen XAML). I don't envy the post-IE6 group, having to take a huge codebase, maintain backwards compatability, and staff an _entirely_ new team.
But, take that with a grain of salt, as I was in DevDiv at the time this happened. I certainly had some peers who had been part of the legal wrangling and were under mandatory document retention the entire time they worked for me.