I haven’t gone deep into the libraries or something, and was only stating that FIREFOX WITH EXTENSIONS at present outperforms IE.

You Pointed out IE8. Dont Forget Firefox 3 which is in public beta now.

So, it will be a nice competition out there.
Lets wait and see.

In recent years alternate browsers such as Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox have become increasingly popular, with their fresh appearances.
Being the frequent user of IE/Fire fox/Opera/Safari/Netscape, I did not find much advantage in these alternative browsers than having a fancy interface.

Fire fox was the eye catcher, gained a lot of attentions. Hats off for their effort. But the fact that IE was already loaded with tons and tons of libraries makes Fire Fox extremely difficult to cop up with the functionalities that is offered by IE. Don’t give me wrong; I am not a Microsoft supporter. But this single product from MS has gained my attention, when I got a chance to dig deep into their libraries. In fact, the only plus point the Fire Fox had in comparison to IE 6, was their fancy interface and the security additions. But anyone in the net world would agree to me that having a fancy interface can only help you to get the attention, but this will never make the user stay with the product for a longer period.

MS has released their wonder kid IE8 (beta). This release will literally eat up the fire fox, giving them no space to escape. Big advantage with MS is that, it had spend a lot of time in developing the IE in its early days. This was the time when no one bothered about improving the browser. And this is what that kept them in business for a long period. And this is only the reason that forced fire fox, to allow its users to add the IE libraries to their browser as a plug in/IE tab. They knew about this better than anybody else. And without this power packed IE libraries they had no chance of staying in the market.

Once again it is Fire Fox that put fire on the browser market after a long time and made it live again. But this fire actually made the good old IE to wake up and fire back into the market. Eagerly waiting on how the fire fox could bounce back to compete with the fresh face of IE8.