So I’ll admit, I havn’t installed IE8 yet. Why? I’m just not a big fan of Microsoft! I havn’t yet had a new web design client yet either since the release of IE8, so I’ve had no reason to test in it. Now granted, I have heard good things about the new IE8 and I read some early reviews that looked promising. To a web developer like myself, the most promising aspect of IE8 is going to be the better W3C standards support. Anyone who has done serious web design knows how awfully Microsoft has failed in this arena in the past (IE6 and earlier). Sure there’s a lot of other cool new features that I’ve read about too, but it’s going to seriously take a lot to ween me away from Firefox. Why? It’s fast. It’s lightweight (memory consumption). It’s extensible (add-ons). It has better standards support. Shall I continue? I could, but I don’t think I need to.

Needless to say, Microsoft has steadily been losing it’s browser market share since Firefox (Mozilla) first came on the scene. According to W3Schools.com browser statistics Microsoft had a nearly 85% market share in browsers in 2003 when the Mozilla (pre-Firefox) browser was released, or at least started being tracked. Since then, Firefox’s market share has grown to nearly 50%, just recently overtaking Microsoft for the majority market share for browsers. Now for nearly the last two years, Firefox has been the single most used browser, however this is due to differing versions of Microsoft’s IE browser (6 and 7), which collectively had a larger market share. Plus with the release of Google Chrome late last year, that is yet another solid browser Microsoft must compete with.

Microsoft has been working hard (I assume) on all of their new products and are trying to build the hype around each of them as they are losing ground everywhere. In the “Mac vs. PC” commercials, Microsoft got pummeled. So they came back with their “I’m a PC” commercials, which are interesting commercials. They recently launched the new search decision engine Bing (which has been good to me so far) with a slough of TV commercials for it focusing on “search overload” from the other search engines. Again, good commercials. But how are they going to compete in the Browser Wars? Easy! Compare your product based on features only you have or in a way that you can say the other browsers don’t have it or are lacking in it. I must say, they have some good Marketing folks over at Microsoft. What am I talking about, you ask? Microsoft has released a “comparison chart” pitting IE8 against Firefox and Chrome and guess what? Microsoft says that IE8 is better than the other two! Thanks Microsoft, but I’ll do my own testing, or at least wait for an impartial third-party to give me some honest results.

Check out the full chart (for a good laugh) here

I’m not the only one who finds this amusing either. There have been 1280 comments on this “comparison chart” at Reddit as well.

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