I found it lot better than IE6. Bad thing is I cannot upgrade it at work because there is no Win2000 version, just XP supported for this version...
On the other hand, I also upgraded Firefox 1.5 to new 2.0 and a lot less incompatibility with IE designed sites. For instance, the pictures on 4play are now displayed properly in Firefox2.
So, even if IE evolved (10 years to get into tab browsing...), others continue to evolve also, so there are alternatives out there.