Can't do anything?
Well, it can't annoy you with extra features and unnessecarily vista/7 inspired reflections on everything, it's navigation and toolbars take up enough space to be useful, but remain minimalistic enough to leave plenty of space for the page itself.
It, in face, *does* accept CSS, and it's javascript is merely somewhat slower.
It works on any site that hasn't specifically been designed against it.
And:
IE7 creates multiple processes that use unnessecarily large quantities of RAM, and does not close them after you close the extra tabs. Currently, two IE6 processes, one with two windows, take a total of under 50 MB ram. IE8, discounting other-process addons and tab processes, took a full 50MB to display *one* page.
Maybe that isn't much(and it isn't for my PC), but the school computers that they put IE8 on barely have 500 MB, plus with an antimalware taking up nearly 150 MB, and the OS consuming further resources, it is *very* fortunate that they upgraded the computers with only ~250 MB of RAM.
What is happening, is that with every new version they add graphical appeal for people who like all of those new games for their fancy shiny surfaces, and perople like me who care about performance are ignored, since the average PC is, on average, *more* powerful than ever before, so they feel that they can get away with using more RAM for minimal gain since few users contol-shift-tab at all, and fewer regularily.
I would happily upgrade to a newer internet explorer if it could replicate IE6 in nearly every way and only fix a few flaws while leaving everything else a setting, but nothing recent has escaped from the graphical insanity. Oh, and whatever happened to microsoft's backwards compatibility attempts? Answer: They died when vista, .NET, IE8(and maybe 7), WM11(and maybe 10), and others appeared. If they has phased the oldest features out, it would be fine, but they increased memory usage, created larger programs, designed for appearance, and lost backwards compatibility all in one big blunder.
There is a wide line between pleasantly simple and what they did, and they lept right over it, and then some extra distance. XP got the appearance just right, with simple gradients and mildly rounding that looks more natural than the older square theme, but didn't try to push it much further, and the end result was great.
Anything shinier is trying to attract those people who don't care about your CPU or RAM because all they know to ask is HD size since that is all that could be changed on the xbox.
I prefer the fancy graphics in *games*, not as in integral part of the OS ingraned irremovalby in every single window and menu. If it could be disabled, maybe it would be tolerable, but anything fancier than
Is trying to replace quality design with "appealing" graphics, and hoping that you don't notice the missing features.