If you’re looking for a good old-fashioned product war, you’re in luck: The browser wars are back on. Last week, Microsoft released the long-awaited update to its Internet Explorer browser. Apple, Mozilla and Google, meanwhile, have lately issued prerelease versions of their coming applications.
I recently loaded up all four browsers and put them through my rigorous daily Web grind. The good news is that they’re all pretty wonderful; if you’re suffering through a buggy old browser, download one of these now.
But which one? Here, in order from least-great to best, is my assessment:
Internet Explorer 8
After years of lagging behind other innovators, Microsoft has finally released a browser that’s a pleasure to use. Previous versions of I.E. were slow, prone to crashing and pockmarked with security holes, and they lacked many useful features found in other leading browsers.
As you grappled with it, you couldn’t help feeling that Microsoft was counting on your ignorance — hoping you wouldn’t discover that life could be more pleasant, once you moved beyond the built-in Windows browser.
But the new version should prompt everyone who has abandoned I.E. over the years to give it another look. It’s speedy, it seems inured to crashes and not only does it match its rivals’ features — in some cases, I.E. beats them.
Its tab bar — the menu at the top of the screen that catalogs your open Web pages — excels at organizing a clutter of open tabs. Say you open one tab to Google and one tab to Amazon, and then you load several new tabs from links on each of those sites. I.E. is smart enough to know which tabs you launched from Google and which you launched from Amazon, and it will display the different groups in separate colors in the tab bar.
This allowed me to…