With IE 6 and IE 7 losing market share to Firefox, Opera and various other browsers that are not based on the IE engine, Microsoft figured it was time to talk shop about IE 8. While a specific release date was dodged around the whole time, hints were dropped that IE version 8 would ship around Q4 of 2008. Mozilla is set to release Firefox 3.0 before the end of this year; Microsoft has some catching up to do.