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Web apps that rely on features that only modern browsers can offer are becoming a standard feature on the Internet. Sadly, though, the fact that a lot of users don't regularly upgrade their browsers (or that their IT departments don't allow them to upgrade) complicates matters greatly for those developers who want to use the latest and greatest features of modern browser technologies like HTML5. The latest data from Pingdom and StatCounter, however, notes that a surprisingly large number of users (71%) already run the latest official versions of their browser.

These days, even Microsoft is awaiting the demise of its nearly decade-old Internet Explorer 6. Today, the company looked at August's browser usage numbers according to Net Applications and announced that "Internet Explorer 6 is at or below 5% in many developed markets", calling the drop "overall goodness".

At the same time, the company is celebrating its continued dominance in the browser market, calling IE8 "the fastest growing browser worldwide."

Internet Explorer 8 has regained the top spot in the never-ending browser battle today, or so says the Guardian, citing statistics from Net Applications. According to the statistics, IE 8 has taken a 5% lead over Firefox 3.5, but this is not only unsurprising, but likely temporary.

We also have some numbers from StatCounter that show the race to be much closer than Net Applications would have you believe.

Firefox hit a new milestone today, as version 3.5 overtook Internet Explorer 7.0 with nearly 22% of the browser market, according to statistics from web analytics service StatCounter. This comes on the heels of statistics we saw earlier this month, which showed Firefox overtaking IE for overall usage in Germany.

In what's got to be the most amusing celebrity tech endorsement of the season so far, Dolly Parton has gone on YouTube endorsing Microsoft's IE8. It's got this great webslices feature, you see. "You've got to have Internet Explorer 8 to use webslices," she says, "shoot, I didn't even know there was a 1 through 7."

It's an awfully charming video by one of the greatest musicians of all time. This 63-year old mega-millionaire is downright folksy when talking about web browsers.

Internet Explorer 6 is the browser that just doesn't want to die, even though it has now been superseded by two generations of Internet Explorer, and Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera offer great alternatives. Slowly, however, we are seeing that web developers are phasing out support for IE6, and the latest service to join this movement is Google's YouTube. According to some reports, a message now appears on YouTube when a user accesses the site with IE6, informing users that the service will be "phasing out support for your browser soon." The logos of Google Chrome, Firefox, and IE8 appear right next to the text.

Under waves of ever-increasing competition from Mozilla, Safari, and Google, Microsoft has released a series of edgy, PSA-style online videos to promote Internet Explorer 8.

Featuring one-time Lois and Clark actor Dean Cain, the ads are uncharacteristically hip and discuss such real-world Internet problems as the fear of missing something (a.k.a. insomnia by social media) and the fear of your S.O. finding your porn cache. However, at least one of the videos was just too cool for Microsoft. After becoming strangely popular and talked-about online, the video was renounced by the software mega-company and pulled from the promotional website. Somewhere tonight, a creative director weeps.

In addition to preparing for the launch of Bing, Microsoft's much-hyped semantic search product slated to replace Live Search, the company has also announced a standalone product optimized for real-time web search. This offering includes Internet Explorer 8 bundled with search and webslices from OneRiot, a real-time social search engine we've written about in the past. Microsoft is also offering a real-time add-ons package that includes the same OneRiot products.

According to the IE Addons Gallery page, "This special version of Internet Explorer 8 comes loaded with fresh OneRiot goodies, putting the real-time web directly into your browser."

Yesterday, Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 finally came out of beta, but according to the latest data from StatCounter's GlobalStats, users are not exactly in a rush to update their browsers to IE8 just yet. Even though IE8 had been in public beta testing for a year, its market share only rose from 1.39% on its launch day to 1.56% today.

After more than a year of beta testing, Microsoft released version 8 of Internet Explorer today. IE8 is definitely a better browser than IE7, and features quite a few important new functions, including accelerators, and web slices. IE8 is also significantly faster than IE7 and features a large number of new functions that make browsing the web easier and more secure. IE8 is an important upgrade for those users who are still using IE7, but we don't think that it offers enough compelling reasons for users of other browsers to switch back to Internet Explorer.