IE 8 due to be released to manufacture RTM soon

Microsoft's new Internet Web Browser IE 8, is soon to be released from its chains.. or so Microsoft would like us to think, the true fact with IE8 is, instead of becoming more compatible with Internet standards, it has distanced its-self even more, with over 2,000 major website (not to mention the millions of 'non major' web sites, who decides what is a major website anyway?) not compatible - DONT PANIC - there is a 'button' - yes a 'button', what would we do without buttons.... (get cold!), Ok, with IE8 Microsoft have added a 'compatible' button, so when you visit a website and it looks really bad, or totally blank - you can hit this button and the world is normal again!
So why bother? we don't know either, but what we do know is - the likes of FireFox (or Firefix as we like to call it as it makes everything ok again) and Googles Chrome will increase their market footprint on the peoples fav browser list, and IE8 will slide down the scale.

There is an upside to IE8, like Chrome, each tab runs in it's own process, this means that if a website causes IE to crash, or IE just crashes all by itself you do not loose all of your open tabs, just the one that has caused the problem, IE7 will completely disappear if it crashes and you have to start all over again and try to remember which website you had open when it crashed.
Of course there is loads of other new stuff, but to the avegare internet user, these will be unused features.
You have to remember that Microsoft's browsers have 2 roles:
1: To surf the internet,
2: Corporate usage, IE is a very powerful tool in the work enviroment, it can be seamlessly used with very powerful applications such as Sharepoint, CRM, Exchange Outlook Web Access (OWA) plus many more, none of which work at all, or only 'just' with other browsers like Firefox.

So before writing off IE completely, remember that it is a multi role application, but Firefox, Chrome, Safari etc are just built to surf the web - and nothing else.