I'll freely admit that I'm often first to defend Microsoft in just about everything they do.  For development tools you can't beat Visual Studio and .Net.  Office 2010 rocks.  Yes, I even love SharePoint (again :).

HOWEVER, Internet Explorer 8 is the biggest waste of time I have ever seen. 

According the Tom's Hardware Review (http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/firefox-chrome-opera,2558.html) Chrome is the #1 browser and I'm inclined to agree.  The things that really nailed it for me are the lack of standards support and the javascript speed in IE.  These are the 2 most important features for successful modern web sites and having 60-ish percent of users with a slow buggy browser is bad news.  The most damning eveidence is clear - only a 20% pass rate on Acid3 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid3).

I switched to Chrome for most work a while ago and version 4 of this slipped quietly onto my machines without me noticing.  It's a pleasure to use.  It's fast, stable, simple and nearly all web sites work flawlessly - the few that don't tend to be IE specific sites.

My message to Microsoft is this.  Give up!!  You've lost.  You've had 10 years? to give the world a better browser.  Google has done it in 1 year.  The only reason IE has 60% dominance is because it's on every copy of Windows that gets installed and most corporate users don't want the hassle of a non-integrated browser.  If you really want to have a browser worthy of forcing onto everyones desktop then please just use WebKit and add whatever tweaks you need to that.