Internet Explorer 8 as an anwer to Firefox 3 ?

Microsoft has released a "limited" beta 1 of IE 8. I believe it's to be able to desperately compete with the highly anticipated browser that will also coming out this year, Firefox 3. In my opinion, and most people in the world. Firefox OWNS IE. Yap, Firefox is far too good for IE 8 to even smell its feet. It mainly because IE has too many bugs. Many people have problems with IE, like slow connection, cannot use (after launching IE, suddenly IE stop responding and closed itself), but mostly, for me, this is my own assumption that the reason that IE is much worse than Firefox is mainly because IE has to much patches. If you use Windows Update, you will often see "Security Update for Internet Explorer" or something like that. It occurs quite a number of times. Maybe around a hundred of them. Different from Firefox that update by updating by version number.