This week sets the release of Microsoft’s new Internet Explorer 8, and while IE is still the primary portal used by millions to access everything from email to LOL chats, the world of the Internet looks far different now than it did a decade ago. Internet Explorer once boasted a 90%+ share of the browser market, but interlopers like Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Google Chrome continue to take a bite out of that market share. As the old saying goes, if you can’t beat um, copy um.

When Microsoft released IE 7.0, it featured quite a few things that, up to that point, were only available in Firefox, such as tabbed browsing. The new version of IE offers many of the same features that other browsers pioneered first, such as an increased degree of standards compliancy and increased security. The biggest challenge for the big M is to convince everyone who has slowly drifted away from their browser to give it a second chance.

At least Microsoft seems to be striking the right chord with this product roll out. Instead of hyping their new browser as the be all and end all of Internet usage, the company appears to be taking a more relaxed, almost comical approach. This could really pay off in the end since the majority of Internet users out there, tech heads excluded, don’t really care what browser they use and won’t notice if a web page loads a half a second slower in IE than it does in Chrome.

It remains to be seen what the future holds in the browser wars, but one thing is clear. Whichever company ends up innovating more and copying less will likely become the standard bearer for the next decade of web browsers, and with Microsoft’s vast infrastructure, there is no reason to think it won’t be them that comes out on top.

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