Developers working on Mozilla's next browser Tuesday added a privacy mode to the still-under-construction Firefox 3.1, a major milestone in the development of the upgrade.

With recent news about Internet Explorer 8's imminent beta, Microsoft's long and checkered history with web standards compliance has been hurled back into the harsh, unflattering spotlight. Even though IE8 will have a new "standards compliant" mode, it won't be perfect, stirring up a new wave of grumbling about Microsoft's attitude and position in the browser market.

This is a Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 on Linux with Wine howto. This guide shows you how to install and run IE 8 on Linux with wine. The guide also has code samples and screenshots and step by step instructions. Windows Internet Explorer 8 is the latest web browser developed by Microsoft in the long running Internet Explorer browser series.

The release of Internet Explorer 8 hasn't had any significant impact on Firefox or any other competing browser, data collected by StatsCounter shows. While the final release of IE8 increased its market share slightly on launch day to 1.39 percent, Firefox 3.0 grew more quickly and reached 25.38 percent.

The browser war between Microsoft and Mozilla came to an end in 2001 when Microsoft released Internet Explorer 6. Now it appears that the browser war is back, but this time it is different. There are five major browsers.

After Microsoft killed Netscape, there was no serious competitor to Internet Explorer in the browser wars. For years, Microsoft lorded its dominance of the web browser market. Then along came Firefox, the open source web browser that took the world by storm.

"IE is vulnerable to aggressive competition right now and likely still will be through early 2009. Only Mozilla's unwillingness to act—to make Firefox deployments easier—would prevent the browser from making even greater enterprise gains against Internet Explorer..."

Firefox downloads boosted by new release and Internet Explorer security scare. Mozilla's open source browser experienced a healthy boost in popularity last week on the back of a new release and security concerns about Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

Google's Chrome browser is gaining ground fast while Internet Explorer slides. Google's Chrome browser is now well established as the third most popular browser and its ascendency hasn't stopped yet. Internet Explorer, on the other hand, is clearly in decline.