I care. As a person that works on Mozilla development, bugs, and testing, there are a lot of concerns I have regarding this. This is discussed a little more
here.
Yeah, webdesigners are in for a rough ride. I'm sure IE's standards-support will be up to par by then, but that's quite a while to wait. The reason this is happening is definitely a legal issue. Look at his
words carefully; he says that it will be in the same install. Architechture may change a bit (it'll be more ActiveX-based), but it will still be seperate from the OS as it is now. Still, this is enough justification legally to bundle their product with their OS. It also has the secondary function of forcing you to buy Longhorn if you wish to use their browser (I can't see right now why you would), which you'll have been waiting for longer than we waited for Netscape 6.
A big question right now in the Mozilla comunity is what AOLTW is going to do. After being
hit with a $750 million-dollar bribe plus free use of IE and WMP9 from Microsoft, they have the choice of continuing Mozilla development, or axing the Netscape division, and a lot of good people along with it. If they're smart, they'll do the former. Unfortunately, they aren't.