Microsoft launches latest version of Internet Explorer

Software giant claims  that the world’s most popular web browser ia faster and safer than even before.

Microsoft will make the latest version of Internet Explorer, the world’s most popular web browser, available for download from 19 of March.

Microsoft claims that the Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) is faster, more user-friendly and more secure than previous versions.

Steve Ballmer, the chief executive officer of Microsoft, said: “With Internet Explorer 8, we are delivering a browser that gets people to the information they need, fast, and provides protection that no other browser can match.”

One of the key new features of IE8 is “Accelerators”, which allow surfers to perform common tasks, such as looking up an address on a map, without navigating first to a separate website. Web users can also keep an eye on their favourite sites by using “Web Slices”, which are stored in the redesigned favourites bar and flash when a site is updated.

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The Battle Of The Browsers – The History And The Future Of Internet Browsers

With Internet Explorer 8 now available, can Microsoft hope to retain market dominance over fierce open source rivals such as Mozilla’s Firefox or the feature packed Opera web browser. Can history give us a clue to what the future of web browsers/browsing might hold? How did Netscape Navigator go from having a dominant 89.36% market share of all web browsers in 1996 and yet only 3.76% by mid 1999?

Let us take a journey that will begin long before even the intellectual conception of Internet Explorer, that will glance at its long defeated rivals, examine the current browsers available and will end with a prediction of what the future of browsing will offer us – and which browser(s) will still be around to offer it.

People often think that Internet Explorer has been the dominant web browser since the golden age of the internet began. Well for a very long time now it has indeed been the most popular browser and at times been almost totally unrivalled. This was mainly a result of it being packaged free with Microsoft Windows, in what some would later call a brutal monopolisation attempt by Microsoft. The last few years however have heralded the arrival of new, possibly superior browsers. Mozilla’s Firefox has been particularly successful at chipping away at Explorers market dominance. So where did it all begin, and why were Microsoft ever allowed to have a hundred percent market dominance?

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