This past week has been big for the web browser world. We saw Microsoft finally release Internet Explorer 8, and Google release their 2nd version of the Chrome Browser. The tech world has essentially rolled their eyes at IE8 since they have already given up on Internet Explorer for several years now in favor of alternatives, primarily Mozilla's Firefox browser. But Google's Chrome browser has started to raise eyebrows since its release in September 2008.

First let's start with Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer still has the biggest share in the market, primarily because it comes standard with Microsoft Windows. A lot of people don't make the switch because they really don't know the advantages that come with some of the alternatives like Firefox, Chrome, or any of the others. They just stick with Internet Explorer because it's already there. Internet Explorer holds about 60-70% of the browser market share split between versions 6 (20-25%) and 7 (40-45%). And now version 8 is hitting the interwebs and so far for the first week, there's not much that has changed, but why expect a giant flood of adopters? IE7 started off slowly and since IE8 is not yet even into Microsoft/Windows Update, I fail to see why this is even being analyzed so soon. IE8 was just released, and while I don't want to just flat out bash Microsoft, it's no doubt got some bugs in it. People can guess this and will hold off upgrading. I myself will be holding off as well. And already some early adopters are starting to downgrade to IE7. Again, it's too early to really say anything too harshly about it. And because of this, I don't believe you can really look too hard into IE8's impact. If you really want to see what IE8's impact is, check again in a couple months or when IE8 jumps into the list for Windows Updates.

Web developers have hated IE for quite some time and IE8 is apparently no different. I blogged about this a while back after the first IE8 beta was released and how my site's alignment got screwed up. It was on my old design so I really don't know yet how my new design stacks up. There are certain standards that are accepted for HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Internet Explorer pretty much just laughs at them as Microsoft uses their own standards which have a nasty habit of changing with every version. Essentially what you have now is 4 standards. The W3C Standard (The real standard that Firefox, Safari, etc follow), the IE6 standard, the IE7 standard, and now the IE8 standard. I mean come on, it'd be one thing if you have a standard that differs from the official one, but now devs have to make sure it works on 3 different browsers. Either way, I digress, it'd just be sooooo much nicer if Microsoft just adopted the W3C standards and stuck with them.

Google Chrome is where things get interesting. I downloaded the 2.0 beta and this browser is FAST. Javascript heavy sites like Google Docs, Reader, GMail and sites in general are amazingly fast. So fast it almost makes Firefox look bad, and by far makes IE look like a turtle in comparison. I mean in today's world with Broadband adoption picking up a lot more than say 10 years ago, speed in web browsers probably isn't a huge deal so long as they're not super slow, but I have been impressed so far by Chrome 2.0, so much in fact that I've switched over to it on Windows. The one thing that I like about Firefox is its extensibility. Through extensions and addons, you can add to Firefox's feature set. Well apparently Chrome 2.0 has the foundations for extensions as well. You put that into Chrome and I'd definitely be curious to see what happens.

The browser war isn't going anywhere anytime soon, different people have different wants when it comes to browsers, but it's nice to see some healthy competition. It wasn't that long ago when all you really had was Internet Explorer. And now, we see IE's marketshare starting to fade. Competition brings about improvements with each company trying to get the leg up over the other. Stay tuned too because Firefox 3.5 is still under development for release sometime later this year.