I’m poking around the web, as I’m wont to do, and I came across this review of RC1 of Internet Explorer 8. It was the title in this Ziff-Davis newsletter which caught my eye “Can IE8 Top Firefox?”. You know, it looks like a decent browser. The major advances the reviewer claims in his article are colored tabs, InPrivate browsing, Accelerators (new in IE7), and some other stuff. For colored tabs, there’s an extension for Firefox which does the same thing aside from the useless group tabbing, but if you really like the way the Taskbar in Windows XP groups tabs, then you’re sure to love IE8. InPrivate browsing doesn’t store the history and URL data in the browser, so its gone after you close the tab (supposedly). Accelerators are IE’s addons, but they don’t work and are generally aren’t nearly as neat and useful as the addons for Firefox.

So, can IE beat Firefox? No. Its not possible for two reasons. One, Microsoft is slowly but surely losing marketshare to Apple. Two, Microsoft has been losing its edge in applications for some time. They’re being beaten by the likes of Google and Facebook and there are dozens of Web 2.0 sites which do neat stuff. Three, Microsoft can’t win at media players (the Zune is about to die, I’m sure) or smartphones. Apple has those markets sewn up. Four, the Firefox web browser works on nearly all platforms including Windows and Mac OS X. With addons which work in both places and tools which can sync them, there’s little need to focus on a single platform. Five, People are bored with being brand loyal and are happy to own a Dell lappy and an Apple iPod.

So, in the end, it doesn’t come down to how well MS has programmer IE8. It will never matter until their produce versions of IE with the same features and compatibilities for Mac OS X and Linux. Windows compatibility is become a thing of the past. I’m not saying were in the “cloud” yet. That won’t happen for some time (4-7 years, likely later rather than earlier). There are a lot of things we do in the cloud, though. Google, Facebook, MySpace (blech!), WoW, YouTube, Pandora, NetFlix, Hulu, etc… We email. We browse. We shop. We SMS. We post silly videos. We play. We meet. We goof off. We speak out mind. IE8 may make that happen better than IE7 did, but it still can’t ever beat Firefox.

Purchase this and related items at Amazon now: