Gates admits letting IE languish was a mistake, looks ahead at a brave new world of Web apps with or without Vista Microsoft intended last week’s first-ever Mix 06 show to be a coming-out party for the company’s next-generation Web app dev plan. But the show may be better remembered for Microsoft’s sudden announcement of the delay of Windows Vista until January 2007.The Vista bombshell aside, at least one portion of Microsoft’s message to Web designers was loud and clear: Microsoft has no plans to shelve Internet Explorer as part of its next-generation development plan, which includes a new set of high-end Web design tools, the AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) development framework, and the forthcoming IE 7.Microsoft’s inattention to the browser allowed competitors such as Mozilla with Firefox and Opera Software ASA to challenge IE’s browser dominance. Now Microsoft is answering that challenge, Gates said, noting that the company is adding user experience and security innovations, as well as support for next-generation technologies such as RSS. Microsoft already is looking ahead to the next two releases of IE, and it expects the next version, IE 7, to be broadly adopted when it is released later this year. The company plans to update IE 7 at least every 18 months.The company also hopes that Microsoft Expression, its suite of tools for Web designers, will put up a strong fight against high-end Web authoring and design tools such as Flash and Dreamweaver from Adobe Systems.At Mix 06, Microsoft also released a new test preview of its Atlas framework for AJAX-style development. The framework will be a part of ASP.Net in the next release of Visual Studio, which is code-named Orcas and is scheduled to ship sometime next year. Software Development