the guy running the IE7 team is making IE into a better browser for the betterment of the net, not microsoft. and i that I applaud (including his efforts to reach out to firefox for cross-compatibility).
However, IE has a long road to go. And firefox still loads faster for me
Opera is okay, but I dislike the fact every so often I see pages without the CSS loaded upfront.
Web designers like myself have to design pages with piles of hacks and crap to get them look the same in all browsers. This is because of IE6, however if more web designers would embrace the CSS-Zen Garden method of design, then we can get great pages on modern browsers and still serve content (even to old browsers) without breaking the page or the browser.