With the release of Internet Explorer 8 a couple of days ago and Apple’s Safari 4, the browser wars have reached battle frenzy.

Although a major share of the web browser market is still controlled by Microsoft whose Internet Explorer is still the topmost browser, being used by over 78% users, the browser wars started with Firefox biting into a major chunk and now controlling nearly 15% with Google’s Chrome at a negligible 4% and Apple’s Safari for Windows holding a 2%.

So, now we have Microsoft’s IE 8, Mozilla’s Firefox 3, Apple’s (newest) Safari 4 for Windows and Google’s Chrome are vying with each other to grab the user’s attention in an effort to capitalize on new vistas that the internet has to offer.

Apple in it’s latest version of Safari has borrowed a lot of features from other competitors like Firefox and Chrome.

Internet Explorer 8 attempts to bridge the gaps between IE7 and FF3 while introducing some new features of it’s own like: Private Browsing, Web Slices, Web Accelarators etc. which are seemingly missing from Firefox.

I decided to test them all and installed them all on my laptop which has Windows XP SP3. After using IE8, FF3, Safari 4 and Chrome, I found that the browser which stays way ahead in terms of loading or rendering a website is still (my favorite) Firefox 3. No matter what new features may have been introduced in all those other browsers, Firefox surely leaves all the others behind when we talk of the speed at which a browser opens a page. After all, a browser is supposed to open a page for browsing, isn’t it?

But, I give 7 out of 10 to Safari for adapting to a changing scenario and bringing in new features. So what, if they are to be lifted directly or indirectly! Still, safari has a long way to go. But, it sure is ahead of Chrome.

Microsoft scores with IE8 in terms of innovation and introduction of some handy new features like visual search. So, all this make choosing a browser all the more different. From here on, it will be what a user expects from a browser, that will decide which browser to use.

What I see here is that Mozilla is delaying Firefox 3.5 on purpose. It wants the competition to open their cards before they release the next major version so that they can incorporate the best of features in it. Let us wait and see what happens.

By the way, there’s a great article about browser shoot out here. Check it out.

So, Google has finally made public it’s browser called Chrome :

As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit “send” a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome. We will be launching the beta version of Google Chrome tomorrow in more than 100 countries.

Microsoft has released Beta 2 of the upcoming Internet Explorer 8. This is a wider beta release of the browser which has many improvements over Beta 1. It has features which were introduced by Firefox 3 a long time ago (well not exactly a loooong time ago but yes before IE8).

Microsoft has just released the First Public Beta for Internet Explorer 8. You can go to the version selection page and download the version that suits you. View the release notes for IE8 Beta 1. If you want more information, you can go to the IE Team’s Blog.

It is quite interesting now. The browser battles it seems are getting intense now and this is a blessing in disguise. While Microsoft released IE7 only two years back (by late 2006), Firefox which is the other great browser on the horizon has moved up to version 2.0 and has already released the 3rd public beta of it’s next generation version 3.0.

Microsoft did slow down after IE6.0 which was released along with XP way back in 2001 and the next version of IE, IE7 was released only in 2006 resulting in a release cycle of 5 years which is quite big considering that Firefox started during this very period and gained a lot of ground in the web browser market and has steadily supplied updates (security and upgrades).

To see how will IE8 be able to compete with FF3.0, we will just have to wait and watch. But this battle is surely far from over.