The browser wars are heating up once again and Firefox doesn’t plan on going anywhere in the face of increased competition. With its newly released 3.5, Firefox is better than ever, but is it still the best? That is open to debate. What’s new in 3.5? Nothing earth shattering, but some very nice touches that improve the overall experience.

ChannelWeb points out 5 reasons the browser remains a titan amongst knaves:

2. Privacy:Just as Explorer offers InPrivate Browsing, Mozilla Firefox 3.5 has Private Browsing. Once a Private Browsing session is activated, computer users can surf any site at all with no trace remaining when they are finished: no cookies, no temp files, no forms information and no search information.

Further, if a user isn’t in Private Browsing mode, but still wants to eliminate traces of where he or she has been, there’s the “Forget About This Site” feature. That erases the site from the History list, as well as all traces of the browsing session on your computer, including cookies and temp files, search history, forms and more.

More at ChannelWeb

Cloud computing is the latest Internet buzzword, what with IBM manifestos and OnLive announcements, so it’s no wonder that everyone and their brother is hopping on the bandwagon. You can now add iCloud to the list, which is now available as a free beta to willing experimenters.

What is iCloud?

iCloud consists of a desktop with applications and files that you run through your web browser. Because it’s running in the cloud (the internet) it can offer you impressive features such as easy sharing and rich collaboration. The iCloud team is 100% committed to providing you with an exciting, reliable, and productive computing experience.

iCloud has a pretty slick interface, though they recommend you use Internet Explorer for m,aximum results. Fortunately, it works in Firefox, though this is considered “experimental”.

Get Your iCloud On

It’s been over a year since Microsoft released the beta version of Internet Explorer 8, but today marks its official release date for any and all. Early reviews have been pretty positive, but it’s going to have to be something pretty freakin’ special if it hopes to delete my Firefox install.

IE8 features many improvements, including browsing accelerators, enhanced navigation, faster performance, instant search and web slices. As an added bonus, it probably features Swiss-Cheese security with plenty of holes for hackers to exploit, but I may be projecting my own bias.

IE8 will launch at 9am-pacific, at this link.

Now that Microsoft has put the finishing touches on Internet Explorer 8, they aren’t wasting any time in getting the hype-train rolling. They claim that IE8 is faster at loading webpages than both Chrome and Firefox, a claim backed up by popular tech sites like Arstechnica.

Being faster is great and all, but I put more weight on stability and security. My Firefox rarely crashes, nor do I need a security update on a daily basis just to plug up all the coding holes.

Microsoft has a video showing how they performed the speed test, which you’ll find here.