Has Microsoft abandoned IE?

Colton said that while such an approach is good for Microsoft, it can also be good for consumers and businesses. "The experience is richer for the user; that's a fact."

Microsoft also defends such an approach.

"That's not (us) trying to take the Internet and make it private," Wallent said, noting that the company is not going to turn around to try to get all Web properties to develop in Avalon.

Of course, Microsoft needs only a small percentage of Internet companies to offer Windows-specific tools to have succeeded in giving the platform a leg up in a world in which all operating systems with standards-compliant Web browsers are equal.

The browser threat

On the other hand, it is a world where the browser usurps more and more of the tasks handled today by the operating system. That has long been seen as the threat that the browser poses, a fear reignited with rumors that Google could expand from search and e-mail to browsing and instant messaging, essentially providing a platform that could be accessed equally on Windows and non-Windows PCs.

Related coverage Looking at IE's competition Competing browsers sport varying appearances and different advantages. "If another company like Google can deliver rich applications on the browser and be cross-platform, that's something to reckon with," Colton said. "That gets Microsoft back where they started" with the original browser wars.

Wallent said he is not worried that there will come a day where programs like Office and AutoCAD can be written in such a way as to easily run on any type of computer. "I'm not sure I quite buy into that vision," Wallent said.

But that still leaves as an open question how much work Microsoft will put into IE.

Given its emphasis on Avalon and XAML, O'Grady questioned whether it was worth Microsoft's investment in research and development to pursue development of IE -- a platform that will lose importance if Longhorn performs the way it hopes it will.

At the same time, he questioned the degree to which Microsoft had neglected the browser.

"Still, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me," O'Grady said. "If Microsoft just added a few new features like tabbed browsing, it would automatically eliminate a lot of the basis for criticism that it is taking right now. I don't know technically what is involved. But I can't see why an organisation the size of Microsoft can't do that. The only conclusion I can come to is that the browser is not the important platform to them that it once was."

CNET News.com's Mike Ricciuti contributed to this report.