Just in case you missed the announcement elsewhere (I did ) - IE7 RC1 was released last week. I've been playing around with the last two beta releases for testing purposes and it's a big improvement on IE6. Most of the hacks I've used with IE6 are not necessary for IE7, I can usually get away with using just the standard stylesheet without an extra IE one.

From the IE Blog:

I think we will make a lot of progress against that in IE7 through our goal of removing the worst painful bugs that make our platform difficult to use for web developers.

The things I like are:

• Finally IE supports alpha transparency in PNG
• position:fixed now works as expected
• XMLHttpRequest (the thing that lets Ajax happen) is now part of the DOM rather than being an ActiveX component, so it doesn't get turned off by the same security settings which disable Java and embedded media players

What I don't like so far is the performance, but running beta software on a VMWare image is never going to be an accurate way to gauge release performance - usually software products get optimised for performance during the beta phase so things will improve there.

If you are a committed Internet Explorer user, please, please upgrade as soon as possible. If you don't want to use beta software then consider switching to a good browser instead