I know this is probably a move by the lawyers, and the browser-promotion folks probably don't even know about it yet, but seriously... If you want to promote your (free!) browser, you have to make life easy for developers.
You can get evaluation copies of windows to run IE in for debugging free from Microsoft. My big complaint is that I don't want to run a VM for every browser.
It appears as if the IE exe's made by Xenocode still work. I don't have a link for them, I'm not sure if they're hosted anywhere still.
What's really nice about web development (especially mobile) these days is we're quickly reaching a threshold where dropping all support for IE is becoming a very real possibility.
Anything Microsoft does to accelerate their own obsolescence should be encouraged.
When I heard this news, I assumed it was related to something like the licensing agreements Microsoft has with third parties, rather than their simply being spitefully "evil". If they licensed H.264, for example, surely that license would stipulate boundaries to avoid every browser using the "IE video plugin" to render H.264 and circumvent the patent.
