Mozilla’s Asa Dotzler posted some interesting graphs showing historical browser usage. Looking at the percentage of users, Internet Explorer is slowly losing market share to Firefox and Safari.

Looking at the total number of users, all three are increasing.

Suddenly this slashdot item, IE8 Beta 2 Fatter Than Firefox and XP, posted today gains in relevance.

snydeq writes “Consuming twice as much RAM as Firefox and saturating the CPU with nearly six times as many execution threads, Microsoft’s latest beta release of Internet Explorer 8 is in fact more demanding on your PC than Windows XP itself, research firm Devil Mountain Software found in performance tests. According to the firm, which operates a community-based testing network, IE8 Beta 2 consumed 380MB of RAM and spawned 171 concurrent threads during a multi-tab browsing test of popular Web destinations. InfoWorld’s Randall Kennedy speculates that Microsoft may be designing IE8 for the multicore future. But until your machine sports four or eight discrete processing cores, IE8 will remain ‘porcine,’ Devil Mountain’s Craig Barth says.”

Last week it was widely reported that Firefox would soon get a new JavaScript engine that could result in an order of magnitude performance increase by using a compiler.

Maybe this is a case where things come in threes, with Microsoft, Mozilla and now Google all preparing major new browser releases.