Interesting piece about browsers in today's Guardian. The author Jack Schofield is a bit of Microsoft fan and this shows in the article. He mentions that IE is a better browser than Netscape without bothering to mention which criteria he is using to reach that conclusion.
Having reached a point where using IE makes me feel ill I thought I'd read the article.
It's a worthless piece of opinion, almost totally devoid of useful information, and presents a very one sided view of the world. As you say, he doesn't support any of his arguments with evidence, and clearly doesn't appear to know what he is talking about - could be he is basing opinion on old hear say, or MS FUD, it's hard to know as he doesn't say.
While no one would doubt that Mozilla and browsers based upon it have taken a while to arrive, have had the odd bug or three, and can be a bit of a resource pig, you'd have to be blind to not see the innovation, and the exceptional quality of the rendering engine.
IE 6 is basically IE 5 but with fewer bugs, and even then you'd have to say it's lack of support for standards (which MS helped to create), such as PNGs, and CSS is quite terrible. It looks awful (my opinion), it has poor usability - no tabs or ad blocking (my opinion), and security is a very wobbly area (fact I think).