"Compare those browsers about these following : MENU TAB ,BOOKMARK MANAGER, HISTORY, POP UP MANAGEMENT, ADD ON/IN, DOWNLOAD MANAGEMENT, INTERFACE and SECURITY(were is it ?, how do they work? which one is more efficient/flexible ?. "
People may be passionate about their favorite sports team, but if you really want to get them fired up, ask what Web browser they use.
People may be passionate about their favorite sports team, but if you really want to get them fired up, ask what Web browser they use.
There's the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" crowd who tend to stick with the browser that's included with their operating system -- Microsoft's Internet Explorer on Windows and Apple's Safari on the Mac. There are the "I've just gotta be me" folks who prefer lesser-known browsers, such as Opera from Opera Software. And there are the "live free or die" open-source true believers who champion Mozilla's Firefox above its commercial counterparts.
Then there are those people who simply demand the best browsing experience there is. They'll defend their favorite browser to the death because they think it kicks all the other browsers' butts in terms of elegance, features, security and so on. But if a better option comes along, they'll happily switch and speak out just as loudly for their new browser of choice. AtComputerworld, we fall into this camp, always looking for the Next Great Browser.
Internet Explorer
Common wisdom holds that it takes Microsoft three versions to perfect a product. That's not quite the case with Internet Explorer -- it's taken Redmond all the way until Version 7 to get it right. But now that IE7 is here, there's little reason to use any other browser.
I know that lauding anything from Microsoft is a bit like taking the side of the Empire in the Star Wars saga. After all, in the computing world, everyone hates a winner. So everyone hates Microsoft.
But that's no reason to hate its newly released browser. In fact, if you put your prejudices aside for a moment, you'll discover something really quite remarkable: Microsoft has released the greatest browser there is. Tabbed browsing, superb RSS handling and dramatically improved security all make IE the best browser on the market.
At Long Last, Tabs
It's a mystery why Microsoft took so long to introduce tabs to IE, but now that it has, it's leapfrogged the competition. It's simple to launch, close and rearrange tabs. Unlike all the other browsers in this roundup, IE7 does not put an "X" close button on every tab that's open, just the active tab. Move to a new tab and the X comes too -- an elegant and space-saving way to manage multiple tabs.
It's a mystery why Microsoft took so long to introduce tabs to IE, but now that it has, it's leapfrogged the competition. It's simple to launch, close and rearrange tabs. Unlike all the other browsers in this roundup, IE7 does not put an "X" close button on every tab that's open, just the active tab. Move to a new tab and the X comes too -- an elegant and space-saving way to manage multiple tabs.
Better yet is the Quick Tabs feature, which lets you display all your tabs as thumbnails on a single page. Click any thumbnail to go to that tab; click its X to close it.
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| See thumbnail views of all your open tabs with IE7's Quick Tabs feature. (Click image to see larger view) |
Tab List is another useful tab-navigation tool. Click a button, and it displays all of your opened tabs in a list, with a check box next to the live one. Click one you want to visit, and off you go.
You can also save groups of tabs as a Favorite. Use this feature to open groups of news sites you like to visit, or sites related to a special interest, such as digital photography. All you need to do is open all the sites in separate tabs, then save them as a tab group in the same way as you'd save a single favorite. Then you can later reopen them all at once.
Superb RSS Handling
What really sets IE7 apart from competing browsers is its impressive RSS support. In fact, IE7 may well bring RSS to the masses. Its built-in RSS reader is simple enough to use so that those who have never heard of RSS can easily use it, yet it's sophisticated enough that it may make you throw away your dedicated RSS reader.
What really sets IE7 apart from competing browsers is its impressive RSS support. In fact, IE7 may well bring RSS to the masses. Its built-in RSS reader is simple enough to use so that those who have never heard of RSS can easily use it, yet it's sophisticated enough that it may make you throw away your dedicated RSS reader.
Subscribing to a feed is as simple as it gets. When you visit a Web site with an RSS feed, the small RSS button on the toolbar lights up orange. Click it and select a feed to read it. If you want to subscribe, click "Subscribe to this feed." As with Favorites, you can save feeds to folders.
Is Google's Chrome ever not in beta? You can always play it safe and download the stable version, but for those who like to live a little on the wild side, Google's Chrome page has a permanent link to the latest beta version of the company's search-centric application. This makes picking the beta-specific updates rather tricky to actually spot, as so many features end up being organically adopted by the browser along the way. We tested with version 8.0.552.224, but there could well be a more fresh public beta by the time you read this. It gave us the choice on loading of importing existing settings and, to our surprise, choosing our preferred search engine. If ever there was a setting we'd figure Google would lock down by default, it's search.
(Credit: Google)
The big new feature (from a web surfer's perspective) in the Chrome 8.0.552 branch is Google's Chrome Web Store, a one-stop shop for various applications — everything from games to productivity applications is on offer, although at the time of writing, it's technically US only. This can be worked around with a credit card and a Google Checkout account, but developers keen on getting money out of Google should note that there's no way for Aussie developers to get paid — yet. Chrome Apps aren't really applications in the standard Windows sense; they're more like a mix of add-ons/extensions mixed with web pages, as nothing ends up as a distinct application on your desktop in the way you might expect.
As a browser, Chrome continues to be good at its core competency points. The stripped down look that every other browser is "borrowing" for its 2011 look was pioneered on Chrome, and it still arguably does it best, with a single bar for all searches and URL entry. PDF viewing is built in, and in version 8 it's sandboxed, so if you do end up with an errant PDF that would otherwise crash the whole browser session, everything else is protected.
The Chrome Web Store, in its current incarnation, probably isn't enough to get anyone to particularly switch camps if they're married to their current browser, but Chrome's swift page rendering, even in beta form, just might be.
Firefox
The people who live and breathe the Internet will all tell you the same thing: Firefox is the best Web browser for Windows and the Mac. Even after Microsoft played catch-up patty-cake with the release of IE7 earlier this year, Windows users who truly know the Web are continuing to choose Firefox.
The funny part is that it's not about features for Firefox users, it's about compatibility, customizability and convenience. In many ways, IE6 gave Firefox more competition because it was the de facto standard. That's no longer the case with Internet Explorer 7. Many enterprise users are finding that IE7 breaks this or that required Web site or Web-based enterprise application. A standard that's no longer standard is, to many, a lot less valuable.
In the end, Firefox's rich pool of third-party customizations puts it over the top. You can't tweak Internet Explorer 7's interface all that much. In fact, the excellent toolbar system from IE4 to IE6 is partially missing in IE7. You can't even uninstall many of the browser add-ons that are available for IE7.
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| No other browser comes close to Firefox's array of third-party customizations. |
Size and Performance
Opera is the anti-Firefox. It's all about features, features, features. That's so '90s! Opera bristles with bells and whistles most of us are never going to use. That's only part of the reason, though, why it has such a clunky interface. Opera's designers are great at thinking small, but not great at thinking small and smooth. The rough edges are apparent everywhere you look.
Opera is the anti-Firefox. It's all about features, features, features. That's so '90s! Opera bristles with bells and whistles most of us are never going to use. That's only part of the reason, though, why it has such a clunky interface. Opera's designers are great at thinking small, but not great at thinking small and smooth. The rough edges are apparent everywhere you look.
Opera's only true advantages are small size and solid performance. But get this: Opera's International edition (which is what came down when I clicked the main download link for Opera 9.02 on the Opera home page) is 6.27MB, while the Windows version of Firefox 2.0 from the main download link is 5.62MB. So much for Opera being teeny-tiny.
Of course, that bloated pig, Internet Explorer 7, tips the scales at 14.78MB. No matter how you slice it, it's pushing three times the download size of Opera or Firefox.
Which one of these our four browsers -- these three and Apple's Safari -- is fastest? I would submit to you that it just doesn't matter. They all perform in the same range, which is to say they're all pretty fast. There's no test that would be truly meaningful, because each loads different Web sites at different rates, depending on the coding used.
OPERA
Opera Version 9 was released last June. It is now up to 9.02, and 9.1 may be available by the time you read this.
A browser prodigy, when Opera debuted in 1995 it could open multiple documents in a single browser window, a precursor of what are now tabs, which it added in 2000. No prima donna, its demands are modest. It sang like Callas on my outdated system in the mid '90s, and today, requiring nothing greater than Windows 95, 32MB of RAM and a Pentium 100 processor, it continues to play the Web's full repertoire, supporting all the bells and whistles set by W3C without dropping a note in terms of speed and security.
Feature-riffic
When it comes to features, Opera has always been a trailblazer, leaving Firefox and IE to play catch-up. For example, today's Firefox 2 saves your session in the event of a crash, so you can pick up where you left off when you recover. And you can save a group of tabs as a bookmark -- a feature that's new in both Firefox 2 and IE7.
When it comes to features, Opera has always been a trailblazer, leaving Firefox and IE to play catch-up. For example, today's Firefox 2 saves your session in the event of a crash, so you can pick up where you left off when you recover. And you can save a group of tabs as a bookmark -- a feature that's new in both Firefox 2 and IE7.
Guess what? Opera pioneered these features back in Version 7, which was released in 2003. Crash or prematurely close Opera and it's no loss, just relaunch for an instant encore. You can also save your browsing sessions under the File menu on the menu bar. And in Version 8, Opera added a trash can icon to the page bar where closed tabs and blocked pop-ups are saved, just in case you need them.
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| Saving previous browsing sessions is one of many features Opera has pioneered. |
Opera continues to lead the way with every major upgrade. Version 9 introduced thumbnail previews, which make it easy to find your way among multiple tabs -- just hover your mouse over any tab to see a thumbnail image of the Web page. Also new is the content blocker. See something you don't like on a Web page -- an ad or an offensive image, for example? Just right-click and choose "Block content" to make it disappear. Opera remembers your choice, so the next time you visit that page the content remains blocked.
Opera 9 also incorporates Widgets, small Internet applets that run directly on your desktop and can be saved on your system for quick future access. There are games, newsfeeds, reference tools, image tools -- even a text editor. Mac OS X, Windows Vista and Yahoo have similar offerings, but the beauty of Opera's Widgets is that you can run them directly from the browser without having to have a Mac or get Vista or download Yahoo's Widget Engine. As of this writing there are more than 800 Widgets to choose from on Opera's Web site, written by programmers from all over the world.
Also native to Opera 9 are BitTorrent file transfers, available from Firefox only by downloading and installing an extension. BitTorrent is a file-sharing system in which users access files from each other rather than downloading from a central server. This load-sharing vastly speeds file transfers. Find the download you want by searching BitTorrent (available on Opera's configurable list of search engines) and initiate the download with a click. But if you use it, remember this: BitTorrent requires sharing files you download with others. The sharing is terminated when you close Opera. BitTorrent is enabled by default, but it can easily be configured to limit bandwidth use, or it can be disabled completely.
