The next couple of weeks are going to be very exciting as two strong browsers are entering the warfield in their latest and most powerful avatars yet – The Internet Explorer 9 and Firefox 4 Release Candidate.

IE9 is releasing on Feb 10. This is implied by the fact that Microsoft has sent out invites to a press event called “Internet Explorer” organized in San Francisco on Feb 10 to “share some important news” about the browser. It’s worth noticing here that IE’s user-base has declined from 70% in Jan ’09 to a shockingly low 57% in Dec ’10. So naturally, all eyes on IE9. And going by the performance of the IE9 betas in the ACID tests, the final version of IE9 will prove to be a great competitor to Firefox 4 and Chrome 10.

During the same time, we’ll see Mozilla push out the Firefox 4 Release Candidate (i.e. in about 2 weeks from now). This will be the near-exact replica of the final version of Firefox 4. Till now, there have been 10 Beta roll-outs and each of them was progressively better than the previous one. Firefox 4 is sleek, fast and easy with tons of enhancements over its predecessor Firefox 3.6.

Apart from latest standard compliance which will be present in both browsers, IE9 and Firefox 4 will be different in many ways. While on one hand, IE9 will focus more on speed by encouraging you to disable addons, Firefox 4 will instead tell you to use add-ons to enhance your browsing experience. Firefox 4 will also sport a brand new Add-on Manager for that matter. IE9 will offer great integration with Windows 7 by offering features like pinning websites to Start Menu/Taskbar and jumplists.

And finally, Chrome. It’s already ahead of the game as it already offers most of the features planned for the above mentioned browsers. Google recently launched the Chrome Web Store and it’s gaining popularity every passing day. Indeed, the next few months are going to be exciting.