Microsoft is planning to launch next version of Internet Explorer 8 which is Beta 2 in August. However Internet Explorer 8 beta 1 is currently available for download. But still this version is nowhere in front of Firefox. This IE 8 beta 1 is highly unstable and constantly crashed Windows Explorer. So Microsoft is hoping that the new features and better browsing speed facility present in second beta version of IE 8 will help it to compete against Firefox. The Microsoft people are claiming that all the issues related to IE 8 beta 1 has been fixed in this enhanced version. No doubt, this version is faster than IE 7 but still Firefox 3 RC1 and Firefox 3 are much better due to better performance, crash-proof, better security features, fast browsing experience and vast library of extensions which are available to Firefox users.

So if Microsoft wants to win this internet browser race against Firefox, then they have to introduce not only some very useful plugins and addons for IE but also they have to increase the browsing speed and remove all security holes present in it. Even Bill Gates is worried about the future of IE 8 due to tough competition against Firefox and Opera. According to official blog of IE, next beta version of IE will have full CSS 2.1 support, faster script performance, and significantly more capable developer tools as well as our cool new features like Activities and Web Slices. To maintain backwards compatibility with Internet Explorer 7, there is a compatibility meta-tag usable on a per-page or per-site level. So due to this tag IE 8 displays content like it did in Internet Explorer 7, without requiring any additional changes. In IE 8 there is document compatibility, which lets you specify the versions of Internet Explorer that your site is designed to support. This feature will be very useful for the webmasters. Besides these features there are many new things which will be revealed after the official launch. Till then enjoy Firefox