Ever since we did a browser comparison test last year there have been a lot of emails and comments asking if we were going to update the article to reflect new releases. I thought about adding in the new browsers as they came out, but decided against it for one reason or another. Instead I thought it would be better to just do a fresh article, and include even more stats than last time.

I'm sure you guys will get a kick out of this one. Microsoft has posted a "Get the Facts" page that has a chart comparing some general areas of IE8 versus Firefox and Chrome. Naturally IE8 comes out on top... way on top!

I've got a lot of friends I talk with that are already running Windows 7 RC1 as their primary operating system, and they are very impressed with it. Many of them are rather diehard Firefox or Google Chrome fans, but all of them admit that Internet Explorer 8 handles nicely in the operating system. All of them even gave me the same reason... awesome integration with the new Taskbar.

The last time we did a report on the operating system and browser stats was back in January 2009. In January Chrome was starting to take off as it passed 1% market share, and both Windows and Internet Explorer suffered some big blows as their competition scooped up some of their precious users.

As you probably already know Internet Explorer 8 is going to be more standards compliant than previous versions of the web browser. While that sounds great to us geeks that understand what that means it also poses a problem for casual computer users who only care whether a site works or not.

There has been more talk about web browsers in the last few weeks than any time I can remember in the past. Google Chrome came out of the Beta phase, Opera unveiled the first Alpha release of version 10, Internet Explorer 8 is suspected to have a 3rd Beta coming in the next month, and Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 was just unveiled.

The last time that we received any physical type of viral marketing materials from Microsoft was back in early 2007 when Microsoft sent bloggers and other members of the media a little box. Some of you may remember this. The box was a puzzle in itself to get open, but once we got it open, we found a slim 256mb USB drive that had a video and a cipher key.

When Mozilla launched Firefox 3 there were some people who weren't fond of the changes they made to the address bar. With it they decided to intermingle results from the user's history, bookmarks, and typed addresses to provide a long list of sites they might be trying to find.

Microsoft will be addressing a lot of privacy issues in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2, which will be released to the public soon.

Web browsers are probably among the most updated applications because of how important they are in our daily lives, and also because of how vulnerable they can make us to outside attacks. For example, Firefox 2 has had about 15 different versions since its release in October 2006, and all but three addressed security issues.