Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 web browser has not been available for that long, and already it is beating Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome in 7 out of 10 areas. If you do not believe this, then Microsoft has launched a new website called “Windows Internet Explorer 8: Get the facts.” Delicious ambiguity about whether or not this is ironic. Love it.

Fascinating article this. Tim Bray arguing that text is king, and anything else amounts to eye-candy. I have some sympathy with him, I fundamentally care about words and I do not spend time sifting through podcasts and videos. Swaying all that (and without resorting to tired adages involving a thousand words), sometimes there are audio or visual experiences which fundamentally trump even text. So, no, I cannot agree that text is the payload, that remains information. It's just that we always seem to take reading for granted and get ever-excited about moving pictures…

"Firefox should stop with the feature bloat and focus their energy on speed. Once they get that on par with the leader, then they can add a few more bells and whistles." I strongly disagree with this. For one thing, I do not see such a difference between Firefox 3.5, Chrome and Safari in terms of speed (the author seems unaware of Safari), partly because for me, my bandwidth is my biggest bottleneck. But above all, the author is only concerned with his own usage, and is probably unaware of Mozilla's raison d'etre of improving the web for everybody. "Bells and whistles" such as html 5 support are central to this mission, shaving fractions of fractions of seconds from page rendering times may be important, but they do not define the mission.

Woah: 3 Firefoxes born in North Dakota.

"If Microsoft wants us to take IE8 seriously, the company should treat our intelligence with some respect. " Savio Rodrigues on Microsoft's latest marketing – if that doesn't give marketing a bad name – of Internet Explorer 8.

"Here's another rule to live by: When you're the biggest PC software company in the known universe and you have to bribe and/or force people to use your products, said products are probably not very good." Quite. Microsoft's desperate push for IE8 is weird. Perhaps they think that the lesson of Vista is to push new products *even harder*… ?