I'm looking forward to IE10 though now that they bought out netscape
???
look if the only way to IMPROVE IE is to acquisition a 10-15 year old competitor (which incidently was only marginally better than their flagship IE6) than that is a huge worry.
My guess if they've finally realised trident is a dud. go back to where it all began, rip apart gecko and build firefox MKII (branded as IE), as it stands IE is a train wreck. Horrible CSS2.1, no HTML5 or CSS3 support at all in IE8 and below.
IE9 ONLY works if you are on windows 7 and that is shutting out the vast majority of their rusted on users. by the time the majority of XP users are on win 7, they will have usually moved on far more accessible browsers, that dont punish or force you to use a certain operating system.
80% is an extreme number though! unless you are a web designer in rural china.
Chrome AND Firefox are both globally more popular now than any standalone version of IE.
According to Statcounter for the past 12 months
IE and Firefox have both lost market share
IE 45% > 34%
FF 29% > 25%
note that in this time firefox released several (IMHO) premature buggy releases which has hurt there core user group who have since left, generally speaking, to use chrome which was the biggest mover going up from 17% > 30%
In this time as well IE9 was only just in its infancy and was touted as the saviour of IE.
Its increase in popularity over this time has been slightly below par of chromes increase, but generally speaking they all bounce up from 0>15% without much effort. you should see the amount of new folk using IE9 to begin to slow considerably soon.
in this same time IE8 went from 30% > 16%, IE7 went from 10% > 3%, and IE6 went from 4% > 1%, with any luck in 12 months time both IE6 + IE7 will be as good as dead, IE8 will be under 10% and IE9 I think will struggle to pip 20%.
Firefox if they continue with rubbish releases will continue to lose market share and too will also be sitting around the 20% mark, and more and more will use chrome (for the sake of this arguement I've left out opera and safari for the simple fact that in 5 years I can almost safely say that Opera Market share will be approx 2%, safari approx 6%) once it gets above 50-60% of users using chrome, it'll be all over browser wars II will be won.
now returning full circle to the original quote.
netscape burnt out in the late 90's and as a result IE6 took a massive market share. The irony of this acquisition is that it is now firefox (the spawned love child of Netscape) that is looking tired...