Although having one company dominate the market is not the ideal way to achieve compatiblity between browsers, I am more afraid of what this news will translate to in the next few years.

Now that Microsoft is not offering free upgrades for IE, people will soon be running many different versions. People who want the latest browser features without buying a new o/s will be more likely to try other browsers, such as Mozilla, Opera, Phoenix (for Mac) or yucky Netscape (who dropped the ball years ago).

I fear a return to the day in the not-to-distant-past, when there were many incompatiblities between browsers and how they diplayed html formatting. One had to pay a lot of attention to the diffreneces. In the past two years, IE has completley dominated the market. My advice to anyone learning web design: learn a bit of html only, and proceed directly to css.