So the browser wars are indeed heating up, You might already known that Firefox 3 is scheduled to come in 2008 currently the beta is available, but IE8 in 2008 is a surprise to me coz IE7 was released in October 2006, IE 7 required Windows XP with SP2 and was also later on bundled with MS Vista.

What surprises me is that IE6 was released in Aug 2001 and, it took Microsoft’s IE team about 5 odd years to get to IE7 (in Oct 2006) and now just after one and a half years we might have IE8.

Interestingly I was looking through our website stats (Stats from the sites I maintain which gets a couple of million hits every month) and I was surprised to see these stats, please do note that these stats are based visitors from India as the site from which the stats are gathered gets most of it’s traffic from India.

So IE 7 just has about 16% share of the market, and still IE 6 is the king of the mill, Internationally things are a bit different and IE 7 has been able to capture around 31% market share, but still majority of users are still stuck to IE 6 and MS is planning on IE 8. I am sure IE team has woken up and I smell competition here…… Firefox, has been eating into IE share and is increasing its share every quarter, I have seen reports of Firefox usage as high as 25-30% particularly in the European countries.

The good news is that the new version of IE will have full support for web standards and will be backward compatible with websites designed for IE 6 and IE 7 the interface will be more or less like IE7 and it will be called “Windows Internet Explorer 8″ expect a beta in the second quarter of 2008.