This March, Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 got its first taste of Mozilla's Firefox 3.0. The Redmond company made available the first development build of Internet Explorer 8, namely Beta 1 on March 5, 2008. IE8 Beta 1 was announced by Dean Hachamovitch, Internet Explorer General Manager, during his keynote address at MIX08 in Las Vegas. A few days later, Mozilla dropped Firefox 3.0 Beta 4 and announced that it was steaming ahead for Beta 5, planned for early April. In this context, it was bound that IE8 and Firefox 3.0 would clash, they are after all both set on inbound courses against each other.

Net Applications made available the statistics for March 2008 for the browser market, and this is the first time that the install base of Internet Explorer 8 was noted. IE8 managed to grab in a single month 0.02%, despite being in Beta 1 stage and a release aimed exclusively at developers. But by the end of the past month, Firefox 3.0 had no less than 0.28% of the browser market. It is a small victory for the open source browser, generated by the gap between the public builds of Firefox 3.0 and IE8, but at the same time a prefiguration of the market's evolution once both products will be available.

Mozilla is now in the final stages of cooking of Firefox 3.0 Beta 5, and planning to release the browser by the end of June. Microsoft on the other hand is looking to drop IE8 Beta 2 by the summer of 2008, with the final availability date of the browser still unknown.

On the broader browser front however, Firefox has been gaining consistent ground and is eroding the dominance of Internet Explorer 8. Firefox 2.0 has grown all the way to 16.82%, while Mozilla is claiming a total share of 17.83% for the open source browser. Internet Explorer still has the lion's share of the market with a share of 74.80%, out of which IE6 is credited with 28.94%, while IE7 is up to 45.65%.

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 can be downloaded from here.
Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 Pre-Release is here.