Firefox 2.0 Beta 2 should ship on Thursday

Microsoft is by far the market leader in the competition between browsers, but Firefox has been making steady inroads. Now it appears that Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer are releasing new versions to a similar timetable.
Last week, Microsoft launched Internet Explorer 7 release candidate 1 (RC1), the first version of IE7 that was deemed up to release quality, without being quite ready for general release.

I've been using Firefox's Beta for a few weeks at home and monitoring a few web sources on progress. I've been impressed with some of the new features included in the release after being extensions in earlier versions. My personal favourite is the session saver that remembers the tabs from your last session: it's a fantastic aid for research.

The new version also seems much more stable, I've experienced far fewer crashes since upgrading (not that there were many anyway).

It is disappointing, however, that some of my old extensions don't work with the new version just yet. I guess I can't have my cake and eat it, so I'll sit and admire it from afar, anticipating the feast.

I'm the first to admit I can't offer an objective opinion on IE7: I've yet to download it personally.

More great news:

But while the competition between Microsoft and Mozilla is seen as being quite fierce, the two companies have been making overtures to show that they are prepared to co-operate.

Earlier this month, Microsoft sent an open letter to Mozilla offering facilities and help to make Firefox fully compatible with Microsoft's upcoming Vista operating system — an offer which Mozilla appeared to accept.

The browser war hots up...

Microsoft's Internet Explorer takes a serious blow from Mozilla's Firefox browser.

Figures released recently by onestat.com have shown that Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) web browser is finally starting to lose its strangle hold on the internet. Mozilla's Firefox browser has gained 1.14% of global internet usage since May 2006 with IE loosing 2.12% in the same period. Could this be the time for every web developer to start looking forward to developing W3C standard applications without having to worry if the site will look the same in IE?

It seems that Firefox is making significant inroads on some of the biggest internet markets in the world too. In the USA (the biggest single internet market) IE usage has slipped below 80% to 79.8% with Firefox rising to 15.82% of the market share. None too shabby for a product only released a year and a half ago and the trend seems to be being repeated all over the world. In Germany, Firefox is now a serious challenger for market leadership, with 39.02% market share compared with 55.99% for IE.

I'm confident that this trend will continue as well. The new version of IE (7.0) boasts all sorts of things such as tabbed browsing and W3C compliance. However, Firefox already has tabbed browsing and it works much better than the offering in IE 7. Also, the W3C compliance in IE 7 comes with caveats which seem to hark back to the previous version's shortcomings. Not that Firefox is perfect, but it's a vastly superior implementation of the standards!

Now with Firefox 2.0 in beta with a feature list as long as the road to nowhere, I am really looking forward to seeing whether or not Microsoft have the ability to compete with this truly awesome browser.

Just as an aside. This is a very amusing article on the joys of using IE instead of Firefox.