Here is some reading for your enjoyment http://www.geektechnica.com/2009/06/busting-ie8s-mythbusting/
An interesting read indeed. Still we are forced to develop IE compatible web applications as 50%+ of the traffic coming to my sites (USA Customers) still use some version of IE. The worst part is, some people actually still use IE6 which can make your PNGs look like shat. Firefox is a superior browser, however how FF3 handles HTML within XML documents is totally F*****. But, that's another story. Anyways, big ups for the good linkage.
IE is one thing you can't live without but would never/seldom use it. You can't have Windows without IE but every windows users uses different other browsers.