Well it’s been a long time coming with improvements to Internet Explorer 8 to hit the computing web browser platform arena this week.

I won’t bother stating all the new stuff with the latest browser from Microsoft, you can simply jump over to the website of http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/ to view all about it.

I must say, during the Release Candidate 1 I wasn’t impressed with the stability of the browser. Let’s hope it has been rectified with the RTM release.

Statistics state the following:
According to a recent survey by IT consultants Janco Associates, Internet Explorer has a 72.2 per cent market share, ahead of the Mozilla Foundation's Firefox browser with 17.2 per cent. Google's new Chrome browser has only 2.8 per cent of the market, while Apple's Safari has less than 1 per cent.

Another pain point for Windows 7 Beta users is that they will not be able to install the RTM on the Operating System (well as far as I am aware). This is a pain for people wanting to upgrade today. Looks like we will have to wait for the Release Candidate of Windows 7 which is currently been prepared.

Microsoft has released this statement to Windows 7 Beta users:
Windows 7 Beta already includes a pre-release candidate version of Internet Explorer 8 that is optimized for that release. Windows 7 enables unique features and functionality in Internet Explorer 8 including Windows Touch and Jump Lists which require additional product tests to ensure we are providing the best Windows experience for our customers. We will continue to update the version of Internet Explorer 8 running on Windows 7 as the development cycles of Windows 7 progress and plan to include the final version of Internet Explorer 8 in the release candidate version of Windows 7 later this year

Time will tell how well Internet Explorer 8 will shape up in the Web Browser market.

Greg.