The browser wars are back, and in a big way. The reignited competition kicked off by the rise of Mozilla’s Firefox has inspired a slew of advanced browsers that are helping to reshape the Web.
I [recently] reviewed Microsoft’s latest, a just-released beta version of Internet Explorer 9 (chron.com/ie9beta). Now it’s time to check out two others: Firefox 4 and Google’s Chrome 7. Both run on Windows, Mac and Linux systems, but in this column I’ll focus on the Windows versions.
Firefox 4 beta 6 — Free, Mozilla, www.mozilla.com/firefox/beta/. Firefox, first developed as an alternative to Internet Explorer, is now the second-most-popular way to access the Web. Although originally conceived as a lean, mean competitor, over the years it’s grown feature-heavy. Critics now say it’s bloated and slow. Firefox 4 is Mozilla’s attempt to turn that around.
Judging from the latest beta, Firefox 4 only partly succeeds.
While Mozilla streamlined the interface — a welcome trend driven largely by Google’s Chrome and followed by IE9 — the software itself still has a heavy feel. It’s certainly faster, though it doesn’t beat Chrome, the current speed champ.
The Windows version of Firefox 4 has had a significant redesign.
Tabs are now at the top of the browser window, and the bookmarks and menu toolbars are turned off by default. You can change any of those settings, including moving the tabs back below the navigation bar.
And you get to those settings from a different place on the Windows version. Borrowing a design from Microsoft’s Office 2007 and 2010, there’s now a Firefox tab in the upper left corner of the browser that takes you to commonly used commands, such as edit, copy, send page, help and options.
Speaking of tabs, Firefox 4 has a new way of managing them. A feature called Panorama lets you see your tabs arranged…