Now in fierce competition with Mozilla’s Firefox 3 and trying to keep up, Microsoft has Launched IE8 Beta 2.  The second beta is more for the public audience to test out, whereas Beta 1 was for developers.  The features of Beta are what some browsers have had for some time but with their own spin on it.  See the features below:

Accelerators

Accelerators let you efficiently complete your everyday browsing activities like mapping directions, translating words, emailing your friends, and more in just a few mouse clicks. Learn more.

InPrivate Browsing

Browse the web without saving your history with Internet Explorer 8’s InPrivate Browsing. Now you can shop for that special gift with confidence knowing your family won’t accidentally find out or use a shared computer without leaving a trace. Learn More.

Web Slices

Keep up with changes to the sites you care about most. Add a Web Slice and you won’t have to go back to the same website again and again for updates on news, stock quotes, online auctions, weather, or even sports scores. Learn more.

 Due to the speed boost to Java, Firefox has become not only the fastest browser but most likely the default for developers.  The boost is a result of the update to Java already mentioned by cnet.  Firefox now seems primed to have even more specific apps for its browser written as it continues to grow in market share and speed dominance.  This is a result from work with TraceMonkey.  "TraceMonkey is a project to bring native code speed to JavaScript," said Mike Shaver, Mozilla’s interim vice president of engineering, adding that JavaScript performance nearly doubles compared to Firefox 3.0, based on the SunSpider test of JavaScript performance. That speeds up many basic tasks, but it also brings image editing and 3D graphics into JavaScript’s abilities, he said."  This is just more proof that open source is the way to go which brings the overall benefit to all of us.

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  On Friday the developer builds of safari 4.0 and OSX 10.5.5 were released to the developer community. Those who received the builds report a "develop menu, redesigned web inspector and integrated java debugger and profiler." Safari 4.0 also includes better support for CSS and HTML 5 as well as a speed boost. The update to OSX includes improvements to mail.app and directory search. There was also a new server build released to developers as well.

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As the usual Apple press event time draws near, speculation about what new Apple has to offer heats up. Much is being said about possible macbook refreshes and ipods.  Nothing has been said about OSX Snow Leopard.  Apple has a site giving more information about the upcoming update (refresh?) and we can be sure not all is revealed.  Snow Leopard is more about optimization than new features.  Some features include better support for multi-core processors and the use or addition of the ZFS file system.  Snow Leopard has been available to developers for some time but as usual nothing can be said.  I bet we may see more about this OSX release and its features than expected.  This is all speculation but the time seems about right.

www.apple.com/macosx/snowleopard/