Well, the new release of FireFox is out and it is not looking bad. It is really refreshing to see that after the browser wars were supposed to be over, we are seeing again some healthy competition. There are already a few nice features that FireFox introduced that Microsoft announced for IE7 which is due some time in December. Tabbed browsing is one of them, eliminating browser clutter.

Recently a German news weekly posted on their website that they are already seeing between 32% (weekdays) and 40% (weekends, from private PCs) FireFox usage, which is significantly more than the usual reported numbers of around 5% market share.

I expect a fairly interesting new battle in the browser wars epic with the arrival of WPF/E capable browsers [1] on the Microsoft platforms. This time HTML might be at stake, although I would be surprised if XAML applications would actually start to replace HTML applications on the public internet.

[1] For the uninitiated: WPF stands for Windows Presentation Foundation which is the long announced, yet to be delivered Avalon API for .NET. the "/E" stands for Everywhere - WPF/E is supposedly an IE-embedded Avalon/XAML runtime, that will render XAML instead of HTML.