Poor Microsoft.  It is actually facing stiff competition on lots of fronts these days.  The browser wars continue, and MSFT’s contribution to the fray is the new IE8 browser launched today at noon EDT.  You can download it for free to your Windows machine running XP or Vista.

Walt Mossberg at WSJ’s All Things Digital has has published a review of the IE8 browser.  He tested pre-release and then the final versions of it for several months, comparing its features and performance against Firefox, Chrome and Safari 4 for PC.  Bottom line:  IE8 has some great new features, but it is slow in comparison to the others.  Mossberg still rates Mozilla Firefox the best browser for Windows users.

Google is adding to your choices in browsers. Comic fans can get a great intro to the power of this beast in this story about the development and  Beta launch of Chrome. Given Google’s close support for Firefox, I’m not sure why they want/need a browser of their own, but it will be an open source project, like Firefox, initially just for PCs and later for Mac. You can download it to your PC if you want. I will try it, won’t you?