FOR GOOGLE CHROME DOWNLOAD
The bottom line: Competitiveness, thy name is Chrome. Google's
browser is one of the fastest and most standards-compliant browsers
available. It lacks some of the fine-tuning you'll find in Firefox, but
from the minimalist interface to support for future-Web tech like Native
Client and HTML5, the browser is a must.
Review:
Google Chrome has matured from a lightweight and fast browsing
alternative into an innovative, standard-bearing browser that people
love. It's powerful enough to drive its own operating system, Chrome OS.
The browser that people can use today, Chrome 20, offers highly
competitive features, including synchronization, autofill, and standards
compliance, and maintains Google's reputation for building one of the
fastest browsers available.
Chrome 20 represents a major milestone for the browser, but those
expecting to see dramatic changes in major version-point updates will be
disappointed. For a while now, Google has been pushing features over
what it calls milestone numbers in a rapid-release cycle, which means
that as soon as new features are usable in the beta version of Chrome,
Google will likely push them to all users in the stable edition.
Installation
Chrome's installation process is simple and straightforward. If you
download the browser from Google's Web site, it will ask you if you'd
like to anonymously submit usage statistics to the company. This can be
toggled even after the browser is installed by going to the wrench-icon
Preferences menu and choosing Options, then Under the Hood, and checking
or unchecking Help Make Chrome Better. Depending on your processor, the
installation process should take less than 2 minutes.
Interface
Google's Chrome interface has changed remarkably little since its
surprise debut in September 2008. Tabs are still on top, the location
bar (aka Omnibox) dominates the minimalist design, and the browser has
few visible control buttons besides Back, Forward, and a combined
Stop/Reload button. Although some users may not like having the tabs on
top, we find it to be aesthetically preferable because it leaves more
room below for the Web site we're looking at.
One change has been to remove the secondary Page Options button and
combine it with the Preferences wrench icon to create space for
extension icons to the right of the location bar. As it currently
stands, it could be better organized. Some controls, such as page zoom,
are readily available. Others, such as the extension manager, are hidden
away under a Tools submenu.
Chrome's extensions are fairly limited in how they can alter the
browser's interface. Unlike Firefox, which gives add-on makers a lot of
leeway in changing the browser's look, Chrome mandates that extensions
appear only as icons to the right of the location bar. The benefit is
that this maintains a uniform look to the browser, but it definitely
limits how much the browser can be customized. Chrome doesn't support
sidebars, either, although other Chromium-based browsers (such as Comodo Dragon)
do offer the feature. There is an option in Chrome's about:flags, a
series of experimental features, that lets you move the tabs to a
sidebar.
Settings pages get their own tab, rather than a dialog box. If you sign
in to more than one Google account, you'll see the profile icons in the
upper left corner on the tab row.
Even with its limitations, the interface design has remained a
contemporary exemplar of how to minimize a browser's screen footprint
while keeping the browser easy to use and versatile.
Features and support
Chrome 20's features are accessible from the Preferences menu via the
wrench icon on the right side of the navigation bar. It offers a
complete range of modern browsing conveniences. The basics are
well-represented, including tabbed browsing, new window creation, and a
private browsing mode that Google calls Incognito, which disables cookie
tracking, history recording, extension support, and other browsing
breadcrumbs.
Chrome is based on WebKit, the same open-source engine that powers Apple
Safari, Google's Android mobile platform, and several other desktop and
mobile Web-browsing tools. However, Chrome runs on a different
JavaScript engine than its WebKit cousins, and there are other changes
as well.
Along with hardware-accelerated 3D CSS, there have been interesting
security improvements. You can now delete Flash cookies from inside
Chrome, which makes sense given that Chrome comes with Flash built in,
and there's a new Safe Browsing protection against downloading malicious
files. Chrome's Web app support now includes the ability to launch Web
apps from the location bar. This gives keyboard jockeys a bit more power
to avoid mousing around, more readily apparent in Chrome OS but
nevertheless good to have in the regular old Chrome browser.
There's Native Client, too. Also known as NaCl, it's open-source
technology that allows C and C++ code to be securely run in the browser.
It basically lets software run within two protected sandboxes, which
will theoretically cut down on browser-based threats dramatically. When
completed, NaCl will enable Web apps to run as smoothly as programs that
are hosted on your hard drive.
Besides allowing you to disable JavaScript, Chrome will automatically
block Web sites that are known to promulgate phishing attacks and
malware threats or be otherwise unsafe. The usefulness of this depends
on Google's ability to flag Web sites as risky, though, and so it's
recommended to use an add-on like the Web of Trust extension or a separate security program to block threats.
Chrome also offers a lot of privacy-tweaking settings. In the Options
menu, go to the Under the Hood tab. From here, you can toggle and
customize most of the browser's privacy and security settings. Cookies,
image management, JavaScript, plug-ins, pop-ups, location information,
and notifications can be adjusted from the Content Settings button. This
includes toggling specific plug-ins, such as the built-in Adobe Flash
plug-in or the Chrome PDF reader (which is deactivated by default).
Chrome offers malware scanning on Web pages to include downloads, and
the precaching tool for loading sites in your search results early now
works with the Omnibox location bar.
Print preview, formerly a small but glaring hole in Chrome's feature
list, is now present in the Windows and Linux versions. Chrome stable
for Mac still doesn't have the feature, which is powered by the PDF
reader that comes built into Chrome.
Chrome's tabs remain one of the best things about the browser. The tabs
are detachable: "tabs" and "windows" become interchangeable here.
Detached tabs can be dragged and dropped into the browser, and tabs can
be rearranged at any time by clicking, holding, dragging, and releasing.
Not only can tabs be isolated, but each tab exists in its own task
process. This means that when one tab crashes, the other tabs do not.
Though memory leaks are a major concern in Chrome when you have dozens
of tabs open, we found sluggish behavior and other impediments weren't
noticeable until after there were more than 30 tabs open. That's not an
immutable number, though, and different computers' hardware will alter
browser performance.
You can sync tabs and their browsing histories to other computers and devices such as Android and iOS in Chrome 20.
Some of the basics in Chrome are handled extremely intuitively. In-page
searching works smoothly. Using the Ctrl-F hot key or the menu option,
searching for a word or phrase will open a text entry box on the top
right of the browser. Chrome searches as you type, indicating the number
of positive results and highlighting them on the page.
Account syncing is another area where Chrome does well. Using your Gmail
account, Chrome will sync your themes, preferences, autofill entries,
passwords, extensions, and bookmarks. You can toggle each of those
categories, too. Extension syncing has been the roughest of the lot.
Chrome has multiple user account support. This means that you can now
have multiple people, or at least multiple Gmail accounts, running in
Chrome simultaneously. However, it's not "people-secure," meaning that
although your data might be secured on Google servers, once an account
is logged in to Chrome, you don't have to re-enter your account data.
Anybody with access to Chrome on your computer can see your stuff.
The intuitive New Tab page allows you to create custom categories by
dragging and dropping apps and bookmarks, and includes navigation arrows
on the left and right edges of the page that become more visible on
mouse-over.
Like Firefox, Chrome gives broad control over search engines and search
customizations. Though this doesn't sound like much, not all browsers
allow you to set keyword shortcuts for searching, and some even restrict
which search engine you can set as your default. Chrome comes with
three defaults to choose from: Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
The Chrome extension manager, bookmark manager, and download manager all
open in new tabs. They allow you to search their contents and throw in
some basic management options like deletion, but in general they don't
feel as robust as their counterparts in competing browsers. For example,
URLs in the bookmark manager are only revealed when you mouse over a
bookmark, and you must click on one to get the URL to permanently
appear. That's an extra click that other browsers don't require.
Two other low-profile but well-executed features in Chrome are
auto-updating and translation. Chrome automatically updates when a new
version comes out. This makes it harder to revert back to an older
version, but it's highly unlikely that you'll want to downgrade this
build of Chrome since this is the stable build and not the beta or
developer's version. The second feature, automatic translation of Web
pages, is available to other browsers as a Google add-on, but because it
comes from Google, it's baked directly into Chrome.
Chrome is also a leader in HTML5 implementation, which is uneven because
of the continuing development of HTML5 standards. This will become more
important in the coming months and years, but right now it doesn't
greatly affect interactions with Web sites.
Performance
Based on the open-source WebKit engine and Google's V8 JavaScript
engine, Google Chrome debuted to much fanfare because of its rocketing
rendering speeds. More than three years down the line, that hasn't
changed, and the stable version of Chrome remains one of the fastest
stable browsers available. The less stable versions, with their more
recent improvements and bug fixes, are often faster.
You can see CNET's most recent benchmark tests
that included Google Chrome; while that particular version of Chrome
didn't do too well, the browser has seen a lot of changes since that
test and you definitely should not discount it.
Note that to effectively use hardware acceleration, you must make sure
that your graphics-card drivers are up-to-date. Nevertheless, Chrome
remains one of the fastest browsers available, and its rapid version
update rate ensures that it is consistently competitive. It finally has
extended hardware accelerated graphics to older Windows and Macs
courtesy improvements to WebGL support and changes to Canvas2D.
Conclusion
It's hard to tell which is faster, user adoption of Chrome or its
development. Certainly the two are linked, and due in no small part to
Google's ability to lay claim to the "fastest browser" title, even when
it may not be strictly justified. The rest of Chrome's appeal lies in
its clean, minimalist look, and competitive features that justify its
still-increasing market share. Chrome is a serious option for anybody
who wants a browser that gets out of the way of browsing the Web.
FOR MOZILLA FIREFOX DOWNLOAD
Review:
Mozilla Firefox has undergone an enormous rebirth over the past two
years. Since Firefox 4 debuted in March 2011, the browser has been
hell-bent on improvements. These have come in large part on the
rapid-release cycle, which sees a new version of Firefox every six
weeks. Many people like them, but a vocal minority has pooh-poohed the
increase in version numbers. That's hardly a legitimate complaint in a
world where mobile apps also update silently and effectively, but the
transition for Firefox hasn't been an easy one.
As you can see, Firefox is on version 15 at the time of this review. As a
point of comparison, Chrome is currently on version 21 even though it
only launched in 2008. The benefit, of course, is a browser that is
safer and sleeker, with fewer problems because bugs get fixed on a
regular basis.
The Firefox that you can download now is in the same speed category as
its competition; offers many similar features (stronger in some areas
and slightly weaker in others); includes broad, cross-platform support
for hardware acceleration and other "future Web" tech and standards; and
is a must-have for Android users (download for Android).
Firefox 15's big claim to fame is locking down memory leaks caused by
add-ons, long browsing sessions, and heavy tab usage. The company
released data showing huge gains in recovering memory with 150 tabs
open, so you're likely to see big gains with only 50 tabs.
On the performance side, Firefox 15 now has Google's SPDY protocol on by
default. That means that Web sites that support it, such as Google.com
and Twitter.com, will load faster and safer. SPDY is safer because it
forces SSL encryption for all connections.
It's important to point out that there are four versions of Firefox
available at the moment, and this review only addresses the stable
branch, intended for general use. Firefox's other channels -- Firefox
beta (download for Windows | Mac | Linux); Firefox Aurora, analogous to Google Chrome's dev channel (download Aurora for Windows | Mac | Linux); and the bleeding-edge, updated-nightly Firefox Minefield (download for all versions) -- are respectively progressively less stable versions of the browser, and aimed at developers.
Installation
Firefox installs quickly, your connection and hardware notwithstanding.
There are no pop-ups asking you to register, and although an infobar
link to Mozilla's Know your rights page at about:rights does appear,
it's unobtrusive.
We're big fans of Firefox's rapid-release cycle. Initially wonky
implementation has given way to a mature automatic update process. If
you're on Windows, you'll be asked to agree to the User Account Control
only when you install for the first time. Thereafter, the browser
updates silently.
If you're installing Firefox for the first time, or installing after
wiping all profile data, the browser will open to the new about:home
Start page. It hosts a Google search box in the middle, and links to
Downloads, Bookmarks, History, Add-ons, Sync, Settings, and Restore
previous session at the bottom.
If you're updating Firefox from an older version, it checks your add-ons
to see which ones you installed and which ones come from third-party
vendors, such as security suite makers. The browser will ask if you'd
like to disable any of these third-party add-ons. On top of that, all
third-party add-ons are blocked from autoinstalling. Instead, you'll be
presented with the option to allow them or block them on a per-case
basis. This puts Firefox squarely on the side of the user.
We recommend that you set up Sync at this point, because it will allow
you to synchronize and backup all your settings, add-ons, and personal
browsing data. If you're extremely concerned about your data, you can
set up Sync to work with your own server.
Careful Firefox observers will notice that the browser no longer ships
with a separate icon for Safe Mode. Simply hold down Shift; when you
click on the Firefox icon to open a box, you will be allowed to
customize which settings carry over to Safe Mode.
Note that people coming to Firefox from version 3.6 or older ought to be
prepared for a lengthier install time because of the significant code
changes since then.
Firefox automatically installs a Windows 7 taskbar icon if you choose it
as your default browser. Uninstalling the browser does not leave behind
any icons or folders if you choose to remove your settings at the same
time.
Interface
As PCs continue to be rocked by mobile devices, many traditional desktop
programs have found minimizing interface chrome to be popular. Google's
Chrome browser kicked off this trend in a big way, allowing Web sites
to shine through, and while other browser vendors have done their best
to go minimal differently, it's hard to not acknowledge the lineage.
Firefox does a good job of taking the concept of minimal and putting its
own spin on it. It has small navigation buttons the same height as the
location and search bars. The Home button has moved to the right side of
the location bar. Tabs are on top for heightened visibility and
maximize space given to the Web site you're viewing, while on Windows
the control menus are hidden behind the orange Firefox button in the
upper left corner.
Menu options have been spread across two columns, and while nearly all
the submenus have been redesigned, the hot keys remain the same for a
gentle learning curve. In fact, the menu redesign makes it much easier
to get to bookmarks, add-ons, and history, as they now all live on one
Menu pane. The Menu button is not available to Mac users, to keep with
the Mac OS X theme.
In addition to the major changes to the menu, smaller changes have
greatly improved usability. For example, there's now a Get Bookmark
Add-ons link in the Bookmarks submenu. The History submenu now has
Recently Closed Tabs and Recently Closed Windows sections.
Tabs are on top by default, and while the forward and back navigation
buttons haven't moved, the stop and refresh buttons are now attached to
the right side of the location bar, next to the bookmark star. When
you're typing a URL, the Go button appears at the end of the location
bar as an arrow. While resolving a URL, the box changes from the Go
arrow to an X for the new Stop button. It might be hard for some to see
since the traditional stop-and-go colors of red and green have been
removed. You can customize the Firefox skin with the restartless
Personas add-ons.
Right of the location bar lives the traditional search box, with its
drop-down list of search engines. Above that on the tab bar there is a
new button that lists all your open tabs, and you can add a button to
access the Panorama tab-grouping feature. If you don't see the button,
you can add it by right-clicking on the interface and choosing
Customize, then dragging and dropping the Tab Groups icon next to the
List All Tabs button. We don't consider many customizations to be
essential, but this one is. The combination of tab grouping and
Firefox's robust tab-memory management means you can keep open tabs
around much longer than other browsers.
The Status bar that lives at the bottom of the interface is now hidden
by default, again in keeping with the minimalist philosophy and the
competition. There's a new Add-on bar as well, also hidden by default,
to which extension icons can be added if you want to keep add-on icons
easily available but out of the way of the main interface.
One of Firefox's singular strengths is its capacity for customization,
which remains unparalleled and which is accessible even to novice users.
While competing browsers do offer add-ons and extensions, Firefox
remains far ahead of all of them in interface customization. And so, if
you don't like the new interface, it's quite easy to revert it to an
older style -- or just about any other look -- using add-ons and themes.
Features and support
Firefox is one of the most progressive major browsers available, an
early adopter if not always an innovator. Its features cover the range
of browsing essentials, from allowing you to heavily customize your
browser while respecting your privacy, to giving developers the tools
they need, to supporting the technologies that are driving the future of
the Web.
One of the most important features in the modern Firefox is Sync. Sync
smoothly synchronizes your add-ons, bookmarks, passwords, preferences,
history, and tabs, not only with Firefox on other computers, but also
with your Android version of Firefox.
It's easy to set up, and if you're concerned about privacy, you can
change sync to work with your personal server instead of Mozilla's.
Firefox encrypts your data before sending it over an encrypted
connection to its servers, where it remains encrypted. Mozilla says that
the company would not be able to access it even if somebody there
wanted to.
Tabs are a big part of browsing, and Firefox has the best tab management
around. Thanks to recent memory-management improvements, you can now
comfortably scale from two or three tabs to more than 100 without seeing
a major performance hit over time. The aforementioned Panorama lets you
group them out of sight until needed, and when you restart Firefox only
the last open tab will become active. The others, while visible, won't
load their content until you click on them. Panorama's groups let you
label them which keeps organizational problems to a minimum.
The overall idea is to make it easier to switch from one tab to another,
to group or regroup related tabs, and to get a global view of what's
going on with your tabs. It's potentially a big improvement in browser
usage, compared to aiming a mouse at a skinny tab, cycling through a
list with Ctrl-Tab keystrokes, or pecking at a drop-down menu to reach
the tabs that overflowed off into the deep.
Switch to Tab is a minor feature but incredibly useful. Open a new tab
and start typing the name of an already-open tab, and the URL will
appear in the drop-down with Switch to Tab beneath it. Select that one,
and the new tab closes and you're whisked to the pre-existing tab. It's a
great trick for cutting down on the amount of time it takes to sift
through 45 open tabs, and removes the chance of accidentally having the
same tab open twice or more.
You can also drag tabs around to reorder them, pin them as permanent
"app tabs" next to the Menu button, or rip them off into their own
windows.
Firefox add-ons have long been the brightest feathers in the browser's
cap. While there are other more important browsing developments going on
to close observers, add-ons remain important to the vast majority of
people. The most popular Firefox add-ons have millions of users. The
browser supports modern restartless add-ons, which install without
needing to reboot the browser, as well as the legacy add-ons that helped
drive its growth.
The add-on manager lets you search for add-ons without going to the external Mozilla Add-on Web site.
You can create collections of add-ons to share in the Get Add-ons tab,
navigate backward and forward through add-on searches, and as mentioned
in the Installation section, it blocks add-ons from installing without
your approval.
The Bookmarks and History menus, and Download Manager, leave a bit to be
desired. They're not bad, but it's clear that they could use some
redesigning when compared to the competition. We'd like to see them
appear in their own tabs, as they do in Chrome, instead of in separate
pop-up windows.
The location bar -- or as Mozilla calls it, the Awesome Bar -- retains
familiar features, such as the options to search your history and
bookmarks and to tap into your default search engine to provide you with
quick results, without having to use the search box.
The "identity block," the colored left-most section of the URL, has been
given a refresh to better call out the Web site you're on. The URL bar
itself now changes the text color of the URL you're on so that the
domain is black, for easy identification, while the rest of the URL is
gray. This sounds small but is important, since it's a strong visual cue
to help you avoid getting spoofed.
Also on the security front, Firefox was an early adopter of Do Not
Track, which indicates via a header notification that you want to opt
out of targeted advertisements. However, it requires that the Web site
you're viewing, and therefore that site's developers, respect the header
itself. While this is great for future-proofing the Web, not many Web
sites have taken notice of it. That doesn't mean it won't eventually
have a big impact, but that time is not now, and it's better to install
an add-on like Adblock Plus or Do Not Track Plus to get more complete ad-tracking protection.
The Content Security Policy blocks one of the most common types of
browser threats, cross-site scripting attacks, by allowing sites to tell
the browser which content is legitimate. Though CSP also places the
burden on the sites' developers, it's backward-compatible and aimed
mostly at well-known sites hosting immense volumes of data and content.
Another security improvement is the implementation of HTTP Strict
Transport Security (HSTS). This prevents your log-in information from
being intercepted by telling Firefox to automatically create a secure
connection to a site's servers.
Under the hood, Firefox supports full hardware acceleration across all
platforms, which means that the browser draws on your graphics card to
speed up complex rendering. You'll see dramatic HTML5 support, including
for high-definition WebM video, and broad support for the HTML5 canvas,
video, audio, geolocation, drag and drop, and form tags. OpenType fonts
are supported, as are CSS3 and newer JavaScript values. WebGL and
hardware acceleration give the browser a massive boost, which we'll
discuss in the Performance section below.
A new Web Developer menu collates tools for building and debugging Web
sites in one location. One such is the ScratchPad tool, which browsers
like Opera and Chrome have had for some time. It allows developers to
test JavaScript and CSS before implementing it. The Web console feature
also has a new autocomplete option and can have its location customized.
Another dev tool, unique to Firefox, is a 3D visualizer called Tilt,
that lets developers see in real time how their code will render on the
site.
Firefox is on the cutting edge of the next generation of Web standards,
and that benefits you immensely by offering faster rendering times of
Web sites that can do more.
Performance
Firefox 15 introduces a series of memory-management improvements that
dramatically increase the stability of the browser. These changes,
covered by the internal Mozilla moniker MemShrink, basically mean that
the browser can handle a huge number of tabs and add-ons longer than
before. Firefox 15 is eminently stable.
As mentioned earlier, the browser's overall performance has been greatly
improved by tying performance to the graphics processing unit (GPU)
hardware acceleration. This allows the browser to shove certain
rendering tasks onto the computer's graphics card, freeing up CPU
resources while making page rendering and animations load faster. The
tasks include composition support, rendering support, and desktop
compositing.
JavaScript plays a major role in the modern Web, and changes to the
JaegerMonkey engine combined with the GPU acceleration give the browser
some serious juice. Ongoing improvements in browser technology make
regular browser testing a challenge, but March 2011's browser benchmark battle
placed Firefox 4 ahead of Chrome 11 and Internet Explorer 9. It
wouldn't be surprising to find that Chrome and Firefox currently test
much closer to each other because of their regular updates.
CNET Labs will have an update to our performance benchmarks in the
coming weeks. For now, our most recent numbers are from March 2011, when
Firefox 4 was released.
One interesting publicly available benchmark is
JSGameBench
from Facebook, which looks to test HTML5 in real-world gaming
situations. JSGameBench hasn't posted new results since April 2011, but
the ones it did post gave strong marks to the Firefox 4 beta both with
and without
WebGL. The stable version of Firefox 4 also
did well in JSGameBench tests once it was released.
Note that to effectively use hardware acceleration, you must make sure that your graphics card drivers are up-to-date.
Browser benchmarks are a notoriously fidgety lot, and often come up
against legitimate complaints that they look at too narrow a set of
features -- such as checking only JavaScript rendering times. In
hands-on use, at least, Firefox 15 can more than hold its own. It's not
clear that it's enough to counter the past three years of Chrome
decisively winning the fastest-browser PR campaign, but that may no
longer be the point. All five major browsers are now similarly fast at
JavaScript tests, and you may want to start looking at other criteria to
determine which browser is best for you.
Firefox has plug-in crash protection, which prevents plug-ins like Adobe
Flash, Apple QuickTime, and Microsoft Silverlight from causing the
browser to drop dead. If one of them crashes, simply reload the page.
Conclusion
Firefox is in an unusual position as the modern Internet stands on the
precipice of the second phase of the digital age. As the world prepares
for high-powered, always-connected smartphones to dominate, one of the
most competitive and forward-thinking browsers comes from an independent
nonprofit company.
Firefox's open-source approach and recent developer tools improvements
means that the people designing your favorite sites will come back for
more, while Mozilla's investment in pushing open Web standards means
that the Web has a powerful, noncorporate advocate. Despite the heavy
competition from Google, Microsoft, and Apple, and as long as it avoids
stagnating, Firefox will have a bright future ahead of it.
FOR OPERA BROWSER DOWNLOAD
The bottom line:
Extensions, competitive page-load times, solid features, and good
support for "future Web" technologies make Opera 12 an excellent
browser, but it's treading water where it used to lead.
Review:
The second-oldest browser currently in use, Opera debuted way back in
1994 and continues to attract attention. Its feature-phone version
claims more than 160 million users worldwide. While desktop Opera isn't
quite as heavily used, it has developed a reputation as a leader on
feature development, and can hold its own against the big four.
Opera covers the basics with tabbed browsing, mouse-over previews, a
customizable search bar, advanced bookmarking tools, and simple
integration with e-mail and chat clients. Mouse-gesture support,
keyboard shortcuts, and drag-and-drop functionality round out the
essentials.
Installation
Installing Opera is a fast and short process, taking less than 2
minutes. Many of Opera's built-in features require creating a MyOpera
account, but the browser will only prompt you to do so when you use them
for the first time -- it's not required to browse.
Tap the Options button on the first install screen to reveal
configuration tweaks. Besides changing the browser's default language
and install path, you can also install for just the currently signed-on
user, or choose to install Opera directly to an external device. It's a
great, simple way to create a portable version of Opera for a USB key.
Interface
Opera's interface keeps the same look that debuted in Opera 11, with a
condensed menu button in the upper left corner, tabs on top, and a
translucent status bar on the bottom that hosts buttons to reveal
Opera's Panels, and to activate Link and Turbo. The bottom right corner
of the status bar sports a dedicated zoom slider.
The navigation bar and its associated buttons and extension icons are a
uniform height, keeping the browser's chrome, its interface, to a
minimum. It's a polished look, and one that most browsers offer today.
The search box, located in its default space to the right of the
location bar, can be removed. That and further interface customizations
can be made by right-clicking on the navigation bar and selecting
customize.
The influence of the radical interface changes that Google Chrome
introduced in 2008 can be seen here, from tabs on top to the extension
icons, yet Opera's personality does still come through enough to have a
different vibe and feel from Chrome. A red Opera "O" logo button in the
upper left corner reveals options and menus, while a wrench icon on the
New Tab page allows you to customize Opera's forward-thinking Speed
Dial.
Features and support
The five major browsers have been liberally borrowing features and
innovations from each other for years, yet Opera has developed a
reputation for showcasing some of the more interesting browser
developments first. That's fallen off a bit in version 12, which
showcases more catching up than trailblazing leadership.
Quirky features such as Widgets, Unite, and Voice have been killed off,
which means that there's less bloat in the browser. But no doubt that
those executions were performed also because of a lack of user interest.
Opera 12's hardware acceleration, which is when the browser uses the
graphics processor to render animations faster and more smoothly, is
still a work in progress. It's in the browser, but you must manually activate it for now.
Many changes in Opera 12 that pull it closer to parity with the
competition. These include separate processes for plug-ins like Flash
and QuickTime, so that when the plug-in crashes, the browser doesn't
burn up with it; a lightweight add-on structure powered by HTML5,
JavaScript, and CSS emphasized for extensions and now themes; and
redesigned location bar security badges that are easier to read.
This isn't to say that Opera can't compare, because it holds up well.
It's just not quite as innovative in this version as in the past. You
still get tab stacks, a way to group tabs and cut down on tab clutter;
tab pinning; and Opera Link for syncing Bookmarks, Speed Dial, Notes,
and passwords to other instances of Opera, including Opera Mobile and
Opera Mini. Sadly, there's still no tab sync in Opera.
There's Growl and multitouch trackpad support on Macs, support for some
HTML5 including next-generation video and audio codec WebM, geolocation
compatibility, Web Workers, App Cache, and Web fonts. The Web Open Font
Format (WOFF), which Opera co-sponsored, hasn't yet been added, although
Opera expects it will be soon. And Opera 12 has added HTML5 support for
controlling local media hardware, such as Webcams, from Web sites.
One of Opera's lesser-known features is its integrated mail client. It's
a reasonable alternative to Outlook, offering many similar features. It
can handle importing mailbox files from Outlook Express, Thunderbird,
Netscape, and Eudora, supports POP3 and IMAP, and quickly synced with
Gmail when we added our account.
There are other features in Opera, including tab previews, newsgroups
support, a built-in session manager, and a fantastic array of
customizations that rival Firefox. Of all the browsers out there, Opera
ships with a massive feature set and is an excellent choice for users
who want something fast and robust but just a bit old-school right out
of the box. However, aside from the integrated mail support, much of
what Opera offers can now be found elsewhere.
Performance
Full benchmarks will be added here as they are completed, but
preliminary results indicate that Opera 12's page-load times remain
comparable to its competitors on publicly available benchmark tests.
Short version: It's an extremely fast browser. And although rumors
persist about Web site incompatibility, we've yet to encounter any major
site that Opera had problems with.
Conclusion
Opera is in firm grip of the fifth-place slot in the race to be the
world's most-used browser. It doesn't have the backing of a major
corporation like Apple's Safari, Google's Chrome, or Microsoft's
Internet Explorer, and it lacks the massive, open developer's community
of Mozilla's Firefox. What it does have are a fantastic combination of
speed and built-in services, and a mobile base that's enormous.
What's missing is a compelling argument for adoption beyond a dislike of
the other four. As much as we enjoy our time using Opera, it doesn't
surpass the competition -- it only matches it.
Opera's latest beta is blazing:
FOR APPLE SAFARI DOWNLOAD
The previous version of Safari for Windows dramatically changed the
nature of the browser from something of an unfinished curiosity to an
alternative with seriously quick chops. It lacked many of the
customization features that define most other browsers, but certain
unique default features, such as the visually impressive, Cover
Flow-inspired Top Sites and history viewing, made it worth checking out
for more users besides just browser enthusiasts and jaded reviewers.
Though Safari 5 continues the push for speed, able to surpass (by some
tests) bleeding-edge JavaScript engines from Google and Opera, Apple
continues to place feature development farther down the totem pole of
importance. That doesn't mean that new features have been ignored.
There's the new Reader option that streamlines how you read articles,
broader support for HTML5, default support for searches on Bing, and
performance improvements. However, the biggest new feature of them
all--Extensions--won't be available until later this summer according to
Apple, and depending on what you're looking for in a browser, Safari
can be seen as lacking many helpful options.
Installation and setup
Safari 5 is easy to install, although the time it takes to run the
installer feels longer than its major alterna-browser competitors of
Firefox, Chrome, and Opera. It updates using the Apple Software Updater,
which may opt you in to other Windows-based Apple programs when it
detects an update. Safari does not come with an uninstaller, and so it
must be removed using the default Windows Add/Remove Programs tool or a
third-party remover.
Interface
Safari's interface hasn't changed much from Safari 4. Navigation remains
on top in this version, with Back and Forward buttons, the location
bar, the search box, current page menu, and preferences menu. Whereas
both Safari and Chrome are based on WebKit, Safari has opted to keep its
tabs below the navigation bar and retain its brushed gray interface. It
will look the same on Windows XP or Windows 7, since there's no real
support for Aero Glass. In many ways, it's not as minimal as Chrome or
Opera, and feels a bit older because of it.
The bookmarks bar appears by default just below the navigation bar, and
on all but significantly older computers users should see links to show
all bookmarks and show Top Sites on the left.
The status bar remains hidden by default, which would be acceptable if
there was another way to view a link's URL before clicking on it. Chrome
manages a small pop-up at the bottom of the browser, but since Safari
doesn't, we recommend forcing the status bar to appear for safety
reasons. It's never a good idea to click blindly on a link, and it's
unfortunate that the default Safari encourages this behavior. The status
bar can be forced to appear from the View option on the menu bar, which
is also hidden by default. You can force show the menu bar at the top
of the Preferences menu, or by hitting the Alt key.
Features and support
Safari 5 comes with a new way to look at paginated stories and
galleries, some helpful lesser feature improvements, and the promise of
Extensions. As noted earlier, though, Apple has decided to not include
many options that Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer, and even Safari's
cousin Chrome have.
The official late summer street date for the
new Extensions gallery
leaves many questions up for debate. Apple has said that the new
framework restricts which extensions can be installed to those that have
been approved by Apple. It's not clear at this time if or how that
system will be different from the add-on networks supported by Google's
Chrome and Mozilla's Firefox, but given Apple's heavy hand in content
control on the newly renamed iOS, it's not unreasonable to expect the
company to take that approach as well with Safari Extensions.
The new Reader feature in Safari streamlines both single and multipage stories into a more legible format.
(Credit:
Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)
Apple has created a Safari Developer Program
to guide, and perhaps curate, extension development, and to that end
has allowed users to toggle on the Extensions menu from the Advanced tab
under Preferences. This will add the Develop menu to the menu bar, from
which you'll need to click on Enable Extensions. Extensions can be
added from one of the unofficial Safari Extensions collections,
and managed from the Extensions tab that should now appear in the
Preferences windows. At the time this review was written, most
extensions had been ported from Google Chrome since both browsers share
the same rendering engine.
The most interesting new feature in Safari that's ready to use is the
Reader
button. This button appears at the right side of the location bar when
you load a site with pagination, such as a multipage article or gallery.
Hitting it will open an overlay window that combines all pages into a
single, scrollable format and tints out the site beneath, including ads
and other distractions. Any embedded pictures or videos remain viewable,
although, like the text of the story, they lose their site-specific
formatting in favor of the Reader's defaults. Reader also comes with
five buttons at the bottom of the frame that appear only when you mouse
over them. You can zoom in, zoom out, e-mail the page, or print the page
in its Reader format.
Reader is a more limited version of the code used in the Readability bookmarklet.
What's innovative about the Safari version is that Apple decided to
include it at all, but because it's such an obvious feature to include
in a Web browser, it wouldn't be surprising to see others follow suit.
Besides reactivating formatting options such as font size, what's
keeping this feature from being really impressive is a lack of sharing
beyond e-mail. It'd be great if you could use it to immediately share an
article on Twitter or Facebook.
HTML5 gets a lot of love in Safari 5, pushing the browser to the
top of the list of HTML5 browser versions that aren't in beta or
development. Safari now supports HTML5-based full-screen video playback,
video closed captioning, geolocation, drag and drop, forms validation,
HTML5 Ruby, EventSource, and WebSocket. But in an odd turn from Apple,
the HTML5 demo Web site is restricted to Safari browsers only.
Apple hasn't activated Extensions in Safari officially, but it has provided you with a workaround.
(Credit:
Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)
Safari now comes with local searches enabled from the location bar, so
as you type your query you can see how it relates to your history and
bookmarks. However, there's still no location-bar-based Web search,
something that Firefox, Chrome, and Opera have had for varying but
lengthy amounts of time. Safari has also added Bing search to its
default search engine options, but again, its competitors have allowed
full search engine customization for a long time.
Although its search abilities may not be up to par with the competition,
Safari has begun to introduce a modicum of tab customization. The Tab
window in Preferences gives you far more customizations than before,
including opening into a new tab, some control over the tab focus on new
tabs, and confirmation before closing multiple tabs. Safari 5 does not
offer a session manager; it also doesn't natively respect your default
browser for opening links. To change this, you'll need to go to the
General tab under Preferences and change the default Web browser
setting.
These deficiencies certainly won't kill Safari, but they're odd ones to leave out.
Performance
Safari's performance has definitely been improved, and it remains the
browser's strongest selling point, in part because of the hardware
acceleration (only in the Windows version, read more about hardware
acceleration
here) and
DNS prefetching. Part of that is because of the improvements made to the Nitro JavaScript engine.
On Windows, users get the visual indicators for
multiple tabs, but there's still no support for jump lists or recently
viewed sites.
(Credit:
Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)
On a Windows 7 x86, running on an Intel Core 2 Duo T9400 at 2.53GHz,
with 3GB of RAM, Safari notched an average of 465.5 milliseconds over
three cold-boot runs on the SunSpider JavaScript test. The current
stable version of Chrome released today, version 5.0.375.70, scored
525.19 ms. The disparity between the Mac versions was far greater. On a
Mac OS X 10.6.3, running on the same Intel chip as the Windows 7
computer but with 4GB of RAM, Safari 5 completed the SunSpider tests in
351.7 ms. Google Chrome took 498.67 ms. Though the developer's version
of Chrome comes in at 356.9 ms on the Windows 7 computer, indicating
that Safari's benchmarks can be not only achieved but surpassed,
Safari's the only stable public version with these numbers.
Conclusion
Speed is important, but it's not the only judge of a good browser. With
the exception of the unique Reader feature, Safari 5 does more to bring
Apple's browser into line with other browsers than actually
trailblazing, and even with the improvements made to this version,
Safari still lacks many of the small but useful features competitors
offer. For raw JavaScript speed, Safari is at the head of the pack for
now, but Apple's focus on other user needs remains less than exemplary.
INTERNET EXPLORER FOR WIN XP DOWNLOAD
nternet Explorer 8 addresses just about all of the major concerns
that users and critics have had with the world's most used browser.
Whether they get answered in a way you like is another matter.
There are several new and interesting features. Web Slices lets you save
predefined sections of a Web page for at-a-glance viewing. Instead of
going to a traffic Web site for updates, the latest commuting news comes
to you. Similarly, Accelerators make repetitive tasks one-click
behaviors, for instance finding directions or blogging. InPrivate
browsing introduces a cache and history on-off switch, while related
tabs are color-coded and automatically reorganized as you open them.
There's also tab sandboxing, which means that when a tab crashes, IE
itself won't, and it even tries to resurrect the page that crashed.
There's a greater emphasis on Web standards and security than before.
The SmartScreen and cross-site scripting filters throw up a red warning
page when you're about to visit an unsafe site. There's also domain
highlighting, which grays out the name of the URL you're looking at
except for the domain itself. This sounds simple, but effectively draws
attention to spoofed site URLs. There's also a compatibility button so
that sites designed specifically for IE 7 and earlier can still be
viewed.
IE 8 lacks a default "smart" location bar that many other browsers have,
but you can search your history and most visited pages from there.
Also, the installation process still requires a reboot--unimpressive, to
say the least. Drawbacks aside, there's no reason to not upgrade if
you're an old fan of IE, and there's even a few things in IE 8 for new
users.
INTERNET EXPLORER FOR WIN 7 AND WIN VISTA DOWNLOAD
The bottom line:
Internet Explorer 9 is surprisingly competitive across the board. Zippy
browsing speeds, minimalist layout, and innovative features make this
not only the best version of IE to date, but will catapult Internet
Explorer back into the browser wars. The one big drawback? You must have
Windows 7 or Vista to use it. XP users are stuck on IE8. Forever.
Review:
The sound bite on Internet Explorer 9 will be a variation of "it doesn't
suck," yet the changes to the browser go far deeper than that glib
comment can reflect. Microsoft engineered a campaign, starting last
year, to change the browser's image with both developers and casual
users that was similar to the way that it got people on board with
Windows 7. Frequent developer previews, devoid of features showed Web developers what the browser could do. It was only with the launch of the first beta
that Microsoft added the interface. By then, the browser had already
made an impact with developers because of its standards support and
in-page rendering speeds, and much of the buzz coming from them was
positive.
Installation 3
Microsoft has split the installer for IE9 into four versions, depending
on your operating system, so be sure that you download the correct one.
Different versions are available for Windows 7 x86, Windows 7 x64,
Windows Vista x86, and Windows Vista x64, and Microsoft's site ought to
autodetect your OS. While not the most convenient download, it's not the
kind of thing for which we would dock the score.
What is a major problem with the IE9 installation process is that the
browser will not work on Windows XP, which still has about 40 percent of
the worldwide computer market a year and a half after Windows 7's
release. There is no version of IE9 for Windows XP, and there never will
be one.
Microsoft is clearly taking a page from Apple here, a company that has
used forced obsolescence to its advantage. It's a big risk for Microsoft
customers, though, who are used to support for older hardware and
software. We love Windows 7,
and will be extremely happy when the majority of Windows computers are
running it, but hardball tactics over hardware acceleration are not the
way to go--especially when competitors have demonstrated full hardware
acceleration on Windows XP.
After installing, Internet Explorer 9 also requires either a reboot or
for you to shut down all your open programs. This indicates that the
very manner in which the browser interacts with Windows 7 and Vista has
been changed, probably for the better, but nevertheless it's an
annoyance.
Interface
The browser interface has undergone an enormous change, following the
trend of minimizing the layout to maximize screen space. Microsoft takes
an approach interestingly different than its competitors, which placed
the tabs above the location bar. In IE9, the tabs reside by default on
the same row as the location bar, although you can switch this via a
context menu. However, if you choose the Show Tabs on a Separate Row
option, the tabs will move below the location bar--not above it, as
Chrome, Firefox 4, and Opera have them.
The problem with tabs on the same row as the location bar is that when
you have more than five or so tabs open, the combined location bar and
tab bar feels cramped in a way that other minimalist interfaces avoid.
It may work for some people, but the experience suffers from an
otherwise unnecessary shortening of the location bar and a limited
amount of space available for tabs. If you only have a handful of tabs
open at a time, you might not mind. It quickly becomes difficult to
distinguish multiple tabs.
The interface isn't the only part of IE9 that's
gone back to basics. Notifications, such as the session recovery
warning shown here, appear at the bottom of the browser window and won't
"grab your focus" and prevent you from continuing to browse.
(Credit:
Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)
Besides that drawback, IE's new look is quite usable. The stop and
refresh buttons have been shrunk to take up as little space as possible
while still being visible. They now live on the right side of the
location bar, inside the bar itself along with the search drop-down menu
icon. It's a bit curious that Microsoft didn't combine Stop and Refresh
into one, as other browsers have. The cramped location-and-tab bar
could use all the extra space it can get.
The location bar isn't the only part of IE9 that's gone back to basics.
Notifications, such as the pop-up blocker or session recovery warnings,
now appear at the bottom of the browser window. They're designed to
avoid "grabbing your focus," which means that they won't prevent you
from continuing to browse. They actually accomplish that task well,
although they do pull your attention from the top of the browser to the
bottom, which is distracting.
Most items in the Command bar, such as print, page controls, and safety
controls have been collapsed into the redesigned Tools menu. Only Tools,
the Home button, and the Favorites button retain their own top-level
icons. As with other browsers, the status bar is hidden by default,
although it and the Command bar can be re-exposed by right-clicking on
the Tab bar.
The new Tools menu is highly usable, as well, with a clean and simple
layout. The Internet Options menu, on the other hand, could desperately
use some font resizing and reorganizing, because it remains a chaotic
mess of choices that are hard to read and harder to find.
Firefox fans will no doubt enjoy that IE9 has a larger "back" button
than "forward," mimicking Mozilla's browser interface, but browsers have
cribbed interface designs from each other since the 1990s. Getting into
an argument about which browser had a specific look first is asinine.
Features and support 4
Internet Explorer 9 is crammed with new features and redesigned older ones, and impresses on all counts in this category.
One of the interesting concepts implemented by Microsoft is a reversal
of the current trend to make the browser the operating system. Internet
Explorer comes with some natural-fitting Windows 7 integration. In IE9,
you can pin specific sites to your Windows 7 desktop taskbar. Click and
hold on a tab, and drag it to the taskbar. The site's favicon will
become the pinned site icon.
Developers who take advantage of the options
available to them for Pinned sites can customize the Windows 7 jump list
for their site when pinned, or add in special features, such as an
unread count for Web mail or media player controls for streaming audio
and video sites.
(Credit:
Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)
Pinned sites by default recolor IE9's Aero glass-style interface based
on the color schemes in the site's favicon, which is a neat little
trick. If coded properly, a site can customize the jump list links,
integrate player controls for streaming media sites such as Pandora, or
have a counter display the number of unread e-mails in your Web mail
account. Any site developer can implement the feature by using
Microsoft's pinned site API.
The browser has had tab sandboxing since IE8, and improves on the
feature in version 9. The tab sandbox prevents a crashed individual tab
from taking down the entire browser. In IE9, you can enact Chrome-style
"tab ripping" so that you can drag a tab to create a new browser window,
but it also integrates smoothly with the Aero Snap feature in Windows 7
by dragging the tab to either side of your monitor. This is useful for
looking at two sites simultaneously. Tab sandboxing will not only
prevent a single tab crash from taking down the whole browser, but IE9
will ask if you want to resurrect the tab, too.
A new "New Tab" page lets you resurrect closed tabs and previous
browsing sessions, as well as provide large versions of your most
frequently visited Web sites' favicons for quick access. It feels a bit
empty because of the large amount of white space, and it lacks deep
customization, but it's a step in the right direction and behaves like
Opera's Speed Dial and Chrome's Most Visited Sites. One neat little
exposure of personal browsing data is that mousing over a site's favicon
tells you in general terms how frequently you visit that site.
Annoyingly, IE9 lacks a radio button in the Tools menu to make
about:Tabs, the new tab page address, your default home page. You can
type it in manually, which is certainly easy but not effortless and
makes the page just a bit harder to reach if you want it to be your
default new browsing session page.
Following up on a report from earlier this year
that toolbars and other add-ons were a major source of instability in
Internet Explorer, IE9 keeps a stern eye on your add-ons and will warn
you when one is unnecessarily slowing down your browser.
(Credit:
Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)
From the about:Tabs page, you can also resurrect a previous browsing
session, restore closed tabs, or switch to the trackless InPrivate
browsing.
Also taking a page from its competitors, Microsoft attempts to rebrand
the location bar by bolstering it with search features. Internet
Explorer's "OneBox," as the company is calling it, combines the search
box with the location bar. You can navigate to a site, search for sites,
or look at browsing history or favorites. You can also change search
providers at the bottom, which is a slick merge of the old search bar
functionality into the location bar. By default, the OneBox won't
remember your keystrokes. If you let it, though, you'll get additional
search suggestions.
Notifications in IE9 have taken on an entirely different look. Small and
minimalist, they appear at the bottom of the browser and don't stop you
from browsing.
The new Download Manager incorporates reputation-based security, to
accelerate the pace at which you can install a new download if not
speeding up the download itself. This means that well-known files, such
as installers from trusted vendors, will cause fewer warnings if any to
pop up. The robust download manager is a long-desired, long-missing
feature, and we're extremely glad to see it finally make it into IE9.
So, there's a lot that brings IE up to speed with its competitors. There
are also some exciting new features that are forward-thinking. Among
the most notable enhancements are the new ActiveX filter, expanded
support for HTML5 and "future-tech" standards, and advertiser tracking
protection.
Like the Firefox 4 version of the "do not track" feature, it will
prevent Web advertisers from tracking your behavior using a header-based
solution. Unlike Mozilla's implementation of the protection, IE9 uses
both the header and customizable blacklists. If you go to the Gear menu
and then the Safety submenu, there's an option for tracking protection.
Clicking it opens the Manage Add-ons window and defaults to the new
Tracking Protection tab, from which you can add sites that you want to
block.
Once the feature has been enabled, simply start browsing. If you go back
to the list after checking out a few sites, you ought to see that the
list has auto-populated. The configurable number below the main list
allows you to set your tolerance for being tracked. If you set it to
three, for example, the tracking protection will wait until it sees a
tracker on three or more sites before blocking it. It's actually
incorporated into the browser the same way that add-ons are. Microsoft
allows you to create custom lists of advertisers to block, and share
them with other users via the
Internet Explorer Add-on Gallery.
Internet Explorer 9's ActiveX filter in action.
(Credit:
Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)
Also new is an ActiveX filter, which you can use to block all ActiveX
content and then selectively activate it on a per-site basis. For people
unfamiliar with why ActiveX technology is potentially dangerous, to
function it requires full access to the operating system that the
browser is running in. The new ActiveX filter gives you the ability to
restrict ActiveX on a per-site basis, with a toggle in the location bar.
If you go to the Gear menu and then the Safety submenu, you can block
all ActiveX content with one click. Then on the right-side of the
location bar, click the circle with a line through it to allow ActiveX
content to load on a per-site basis.
IE, long known for its struggle with standards compliance, has made
serious strides in the other direction. HTML5 receives a lot of love
from IE in the beta, including support for the < video >, <
audio >, and < canvas > tags, and better support for DOM, CSS3,
and ECMAScript5. While this may sound like alphabet soup to some, the
importance can't be understated: when browser makers split on how to
render code, it can make a single site look odd or function improperly
across browsers. Other specific HTML5 and "future-Web" support in IE9
includes support for the geolocation feature, HTML5 semantic tags, CSS3
2D transforms, and the WebM video codec.
The default maximum temporary Internet file size has been increased to
250MB from 50MB, which means that while your cache will be significantly
bigger on disk, IE can store more data locally and make it that much
quicker to load Web content.
Performance
As discussed earlier, the browser's performance has been greatly
improved by the addition of graphics processing unit (GPU) hardware
acceleration. It allows the browser to shove certain rendering tasks
onto the computer's graphics card, freeing up CPU resources while making
page rendering and animations load faster. These tasks include
composition support, rendering support, and desktop compositing.
JavaScript plays a major role in the Web, and Internet Explorer 9's new
Chakra engine combined with the GPU acceleration gives the browser some
serious rocket fuel. We'll update this section with CNET's performance
benchmarks as they become available, although initial results show that
Internet Explorer 9 testing competitively.
One interesting publicly available benchmark is the new JSGameBench from Facebook, which looks to test HTML5 in real-world gaming situations. While not the fastest in the group, even without WebGL implemented IE9 was performing toward the faster end of the chart.
The browser also appears to be eminently stable, and over multiple days
worth of real-world browsing did not crash once. For Internet Explorer,
that is an amazing accomplishment.
Browser benchmarks are a notoriously fidgety lot, and often come up
against legitimate complaints of looking at too narrow a set of
features--such as only checking JavaScript rendering times. In hands-on
use, at least, the browser feels fast enough to keep up with Chrome.
Future-proofing IE will almost certainly require WebGL support, which
Firefox and Chrome already have incorporated, but for right now IE is
able to hold its own.
Conclusion
Internet Explorer spent years languishing, and the developments in this
version are more like a ringing denouement of the process that began in
IE7 to return the browser to respectability. There's no doubt that this
is the best version to date of Microsoft's browser, which makes it
almost shameful that the company couldn't find a way to extend support
for it to legacy Windows XP users.
All that being said, the browser is fast and highly usable, and even
enjoyable to use. It might not be enough for die-hard fans of other
browsers to switch, but IE is now a respectable choice on the browser
market.
