Installation

Installing Firefox 4 was a fine, quick experience. Beta users, who toiled for 10 months using betas of varying stability and quality, might be disappointed that Firefox 4 doesn't clean up the beta detritus left behind. That's the cost of using a beta, though.

Firefox 4 does not include automatic updating the way that Opera and Chrome do, although checking out the About option under Help in the menu will automatically start updates downloading and then ask you to apply them. Firefox 4 has gotten significantly faster at restarting and the process that used to take several minutes this time took less than a minute on our test computers. Note that this is for updates after you've already installed Firefox 4. Updating from version 3.6 to version 4 is likely to take several minutes, because of the significant code changes that have been made.

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 customise which settings carry over to Safe Mode.

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

If you're a big Firefox fan, you'd better hope that you're either not very attached to the version 3.6 look or you're extremely taken by the new design. Firefox 4's main interface is completely different from what's come before, retaining only the larger back button that debuted in version 3. Not surprisingly, the new design also brings the browser significantly closer to the minimalist style first adopted by Google Chrome in 2008, although it looks most similar to Opera 11.

The menu bar has been squished into an orange button on the upper left, with menu options spread across two columns. Nearly all the sub-menus have been redesigned as well, although the hot keys remain the same, so the learning curve isn't particularly steep. 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.

Besides 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 sub-menu. The History sub-menu now has Recently Closed Tabs and Recently Closed Windows sections.

Tabs are now 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 in green. While resolving a URL, the box changes from the "Go" arrow to an "X" for the new Stop button and the green changes to red. The visual cues are minor but help to highlight their new location in the interface. Returning the Stop and Refresh buttons to their Firefox 3.6 locations can be done via the Customize option. What little colour remained in the default interface, mostly the green Back button, has been leached out for a muted grey. You can customise the Firefox skin with the restartless Personas add-ons, added in Firefox 3.6.

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 Tab Groups feature. For some reason, the final version of Firefox 4 doesn't ship with the button by default, although the betas often did. You can add the button 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 customisations to be essential, but this one is.

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 customisation, which remains unparalleled and is accessible even to novice users. While the competition does offer add-ons and extensions, Firefox remains far ahead of all of them in interface customisation.

Features and support

Firefox 4's features are robust and generally competitive. There is some minor functionality missing in a few cases where the browser remains behind the competition, but Firefox is generally one of the most progressive major browsers available, an early adopter if not always an innovator.

The most important new feature in Firefox 4 is Sync. As with many recent Firefox features, it started off as a rough add-on and often deleted data. If you were scared off by its early bad behaviour, you'll be glad to know that Mozilla has worked out the kinks: Sync now smoothly syncs your Bookmarks, Passwords, Preferences, History and Tabs not only with other computers, but also with your Android version of Firefox. (There's also Firefox 4 for Maemo devices. It doesn't yet support syncing add-ons, which is one of those frustrating missing functions mentioned above.)

To use it, click on the Menu button and choose Set Up Sync from the left column. That will take you to a window where you can connect an existing Firefox Sync account or create a new one. Within Firefox Sync, there are two important security points. One is that 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. The second is that you have the option of setting up your own personal sync server. In an age when private data stored by corporations gets hacked and stolen with shocking regularity, setting up a personal sync server is one way to ensure that you bear the responsibility for your own data.

Another big feature in Firefox 4 is support for restartless add-ons. These add-ons are written differently from standard Firefox add-ons and are expected to become the format for add-ons in the future. As such, not many restartless add-ons exist - only about 115 at the time of writing this review, compared with the thousands of "standard" add-ons. This will continue to pose a big problem for Mozilla, as older add-ons become a bottleneck for Firefox that other browsers, with their newer add-on frameworks, don't have to manage.

Firefox 4's add-on manager has been completely overhauled and now includes support for the aforementioned restartless add-ons. There's a lot of useful new technology here, as compared with the version 3.6 add-on manager. Not only can you search for add-ons from within the add-on window using the search box in the upper right corner, you can add them without having to jump to the external Mozilla Add-on website, also known as AMO. The manager calls out the AMO add-on collections, which you can create more explicitly in the Get Add-ons tab. The add-on manager also allows you to browse Personas, the restartless Firefox themes. It's slightly annoying that clicking on an add-on group or collection opens the page in a new browser window, whereas clicking on a specific add-on opens that add-on's download page within the add-on manager. That's a very minor criticism, though.

Other changes to the add-on manager include forward and back buttons specific to the manager, in the upper left corner and left-side navigation tabs for specifically focusing on Extensions, Appearance and Plug-ins. Meanwhile, two little improvements to the manager will impress keyboard junkies. There's a new hot key for pulling up the add-on manager, Control-Shift-A and you can type about:addons directly into the location bar to access the add-ons manager in a tab.

The tab-grouping feature seems to be suffering a bit of an identity crisis, though its functionality is untouched. Originally called Tab Candy, then renamed Panorama and now known as Tab Groups, it presents your tabs as an array of thumbnail images. The thumbnails reside in rectangular boxes that constitute a group. Tabs can be dragged from one group to another and groups can be named and moved as well. You can add a tab to an existing group or create a new group by right-clicking on the tab and choosing Move to Group. The hot-key combo Control-Shift-E will also jump between the main interface and the Tab Group window.

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 with aiming a mouse at an ever-skinnier tab, cycling through a list with alt-tab keystrokes or pecking at a drop-down menu to reach the tabs that overflowed off the deep.

The bookmarks and history menus have been redesigned and now the hot keys open them by default as sidebars. Go through the Menu button to get the full menus. We were actually quite impressed with the layout of the menu button options for bookmarks and history, finding it much more useful with quick access to recently closed tabs and new bookmark tags. This is probably the most useful in-browser bookmark manager around, especially if you enable Sync and use it with your Android phone or tablet.

Firefox 4 supports App Tabs, which reduces the width of a tab to its favicon and pins the tab permanently on the left. The tab will glow when updated, a useful indicator for things like webmail. And when you start typing into the location bar, one of the search choices will be related open tabs so that you can quickly switch to an existing tab.

Under the hood there are tons of changes. The biggest is full hardware acceleration across all platforms, which means that Firefox draws on your graphics card to speed up complex rendering. You'll see dramatic HTML5 support, including for high-def WebM video and broad support for the HTML5 canvas, video, audio, geolocation, drag and drop and form tags. OpenType fonts are supported, as is CSS3 and newer JavaScript values. WebGL and hardware acceleration give the browser a massive boost, which we'll discuss in the Performance section below. The short version of all this is that Firefox 4 is on the cutting edge of the next generation of web standards and that benefits you immensely by offering faster rendering times of websites that can do more.

There's a decent list of other, smaller changes to Firefox that are worth pointing out because they'll enhance your workflow in the browser. One of these is Switch to Tab. Open a new tab, 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 having the same tab accidentally open twice or more.

The location bar, or as Mozilla calls it, the Awesome Bar, retains the features introduced in Firefox 3.5, such as the options to search your history and bookmarks and to tap your default search engine to provide you with quick results. However, the "feeling lucky" instant jump to what it thinks is the website you're most likely to be looking for has been disabled because of internal Mozilla concerns about accidentally sending personal information to the search provider.

Private browsing reflects the browser's faster start-up and shut-down times so that it jumps between standard browsing and Private Browsing mode significantly faster than in version 3.6.

The new Do Not Track feature indicates via a header notification that you want to opt out of targeted advertisements. However, it requires that the website you're viewing, and therefore that site's developers, respect the header itself. While this is great for future-proofing the web, as implemented at the time of writing, not many websites have taken notice of it. While that doesn't mean it won't eventually have a big impact, that time is not now, and it's better to install an add-on like AdBlock Plus to get more complete ad-tracking protection.

There are two smaller yet important changes to the way that Firefox protects you. One is the implementation of the Content Security Policy, which is designed to block 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 site 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.

The new feature set alone makes it worth upgrading to the latest version of Firefox. While some older Firefox users may feel that these features add unnecessary bloat to a browser that offers add-ons specifically so that you can customise your browsing experience, Firefox 4 is actually dramatically faster than Firefox 3.6. We address the browser's behaviour in the section below.

Performance

As mentioned earlier, Firefox 4'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 Firefox 4's new JaegerMonkey engine combined with the GPU acceleration gives the browser some serious juice. We'll update this section with CNET's performance benchmarks as they become available, although initial results show Firefox 4 testing competitively against other browsers. Mozilla's own JavaScript benchmarks show the browser running 3.5 times faster than Firefox 3.6.12 on the Mozilla Kraken benchmark, three times faster than Firefox 3.6.12 on the WebKit SunSpider benchmark and six times faster than Firefox 3.6.12 on Google's V8 benchmark.

One interesting publicly available benchmark is the new JSGameBench from Facebook, which looks to test HTML5 in real-world gaming situations. The Firefox 4 beta was the fastest tested without WebGL and was the second fastest with it.

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 4 can more than hold its own. It's not clear that it's enough to counter the past two 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 start looking at other criteria to determine which browser is best for you.

In hands-on experiences, one of the best performance differences between Firefox 3.6 and the current version is that Firefox 4 crashes far, far less. That's due in no small part to improvements made to the plug-in crash protection, which prevents plug-ins like Adobe Flash, Apple QuickTime and Microsoft Silverlight from dropping the browser dead. If one of them crashes, simply reload the page.

Conclusion

Definitely a worthy heir to the Firefox name, Firefox 4's one drawback is that, like its competitors, it uses massive amounts of RAM. Don't expect that to change as the browser is relied upon to perform more and more tasks that once occurred in other programs. It will also be less of a problem as hardware improves.

Firefox 4 faces a much more challenging field of competition than Firefox 3 did. Some people have probably abandoned the browser for the significant speed differences between version 3.6 and Google Chrome. However, the competition has forced Mozilla and others to put out better browsers in order to thrive. Firefox 4 is arguably the best browser on the market today.

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Download Firefox 4 here: Windows | Mac

• Opera 11
• Internet Explorer 9
• Safari 4
• First beta for Firefox 4 released

With One Box you can navigate to a site, search for sites, look at your browsing history or favourites and change search providers on the fly. Check out how to use it in this how-to video. You can also read our comprehensive review of IE9 here.

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• Internet Explorer 9
• Avast Free Antivirus 6.0
• LastPass Password Manager
• Opera 11

In this video, we show you how to enable the list, how to tweak it to your liking, and how to download extra lists to customise it even further.

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• Internet Explorer 9
• Kaspersky Internet Security 2010
• Avast Free Antivirus 6.0
• ZoneAlarm Free Firewall 9.2

• Zippy browsing speeds
• Minimalist layout
• Innovative features

• You must have Windows 7 or Vista to use it. XP users are stuck on IE8. Forever.

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

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 auto-detect 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 per cent 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's official explanation places the blame on changes made to how device drivers are handled in Vista and Windows 7.

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 minimising the layout to maximise 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. (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 reorganising, 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

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 customise the Windows 7 jump list for their site when pinned or add in special features, such as an unread count for webmail or media player controls for streaming audio and video sites. (Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

Pinned sites by default recolour IE9's Aero glass-style interface based on the colour schemes in the site's favicon, which is a neat little trick. If coded properly, a site can customise the jump list links, integrate player controls for streaming media sites or have a counter display the number of unread emails in your webmail 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 websites' favicons for quick access. It feels a bit empty because of the large amount of white space, and it lacks deep customisation, 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. (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 re-brand 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 favourites. 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 behaviour using a header-based solution. Unlike Mozilla's implementation of the protection, IE9 uses both the header and customisable blacklists. If you go to the Gear menu and then the Safety sub-menu, 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. (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 , and 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, it 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.

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• Opera 11
• Safari 4
• Google Chrome 10
• Google Chrome 8

Chrome 10 represents a major milestone for the browser, but those expecting to see dramatic changes in major-point updates will be disappointed. For several months now, Google has been pushing features over what it calls milestone numbers, which means that as soon as new features are usable in the stable version of Chrome, Google will likely push them to all users.

The big change in Chrome 10 is a dramatically faster JavaScript engine. Other changes include moving settings from a separate dialog box into a single tab and limited hardware acceleration for video playback. These are discussed below in the Features and Performance sections.

Please note that there are at least four versions of Chrome available at the moment, and this review only addresses the "stable" branch, intended for general use. Chrome beta (Windows | Mac), Chrome dev (Windows | Mac) and Chrome Canary (Windows only) are respectively progressively less stable versions of the browser, and aimed at developers.

Installation

Chrome's installation process is simple and straightforward. If you download the browser from Google's website, it will ask you if you'd like to anonymously submit usage statistics to the company. This can be toggled even after the browser's installed by going to the "wrench" preferences menu, choosing Options, then Under the Hood and unchecking Help Make Chrome Better. Depending on your processor, the installation process should take less than two 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 - which Google likes to call the "Omnibar" - dominates the minimalist design and the browser has few visible control buttons besides Back, Forward and a combined Stop/Reload button. Although some may not like having the tabs on top, we find it to be aesthetically preferable because it leaves more room below for the website 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 looks, it could be better organised. Some controls, such as page zoom, are readily available. Others, such as the extension manager, are hidden away under a Tools sub-menu.

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 to change 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 in the browser, but it definitely limits how much the browser can be customised. Chrome doesn't support sidebars, either, although other Chromium-based browsers (such as Flock 3) do offer the feature.

A minor change in Chrome 10 is that settings pages now open in their own tab, rather than a dialog box. This brings Chrome the browser into parity with Chrome the operating system, where the feature first debuted. We like the left nav tabbed layout for settings, making it easy to jump between settings sub-menus as well as keeping Chrome to one window.

Even with its limitations, the interface design has remained a contemporary exemplar of how to minimise the browser's screen footprint while remaining easy to use and versatile.

Features and support

Chrome 9's features are accessible from the Preferences menu, via the wrench icon on the right side of the navigation bar. The browser 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.

In Chrome 10, as mentioned above, the biggest improvement is to Chrome's JavaScript engine. The new Crankshaft version of Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine, Google claims, is 66 per cent faster than the one in Chrome 9. The importance of JavaScript performance has grown dramatically in the past year as developers have been writing not just websites but full-featured web apps in JavaScript.

Chrome's tabs remain one of the best things about the browser. The tabs are detachable: "tabs" and "windows" are 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 site 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 behaviour and other impediments weren't noticeable until after there were more than 30 tabs open. That's not an immutable number, though, and a computer's hardware will alter browser performance.

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. It searches as you type, indicating the number of positive results and highlighting them on the page.

Account syncing is another area where Chrome excels. Using your Gmail account, Chrome will sync your themes, preferences, autofill entries, extensions and bookmarks. You can toggle each of those categories, too. It does not yet offer password syncing, although the password manager offers a smart show-password option that keeps it visually separate from the site that it's associated with.

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 customise 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).

Like Firefox, Chrome gives broad control over search engines and search customisations. 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 interaction with websites.

Other changes in Chrome 10 mostly address under-the-hood tech that users won't see, but will change the browser's behaviour slightly. This includes sandboxing the built-in version of Adobe Flash, which means that if Flash crashes, it will only take down the page that it's loaded on and not the entire browser. Chrome has sandboxed other plug-ins for more than a year. Chrome 10 also integrates Google's open-source VP8 video codec, but notably removes support for the licensed H.264 codec, which requires the software publisher to pay a licence fee before it can be used. Hardware-accelerated video also made it into this version of Chrome, which means that Chrome can now make use of your computer's graphics card to run video faster and more smoothly. At this point, though, Chrome's hardware acceleration is limited, unlike the soon-to-be released Internet Explorer 9 and Firefox 4.

In the realm of security, besides allowing you to disable JavaScript, Chrome will autoblock websites that are known for promulgating phishing attacks and malware threats or are otherwise unsafe. The usefulness of this depends on Google's ability to flag websites 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.

Security improvements in Chrome 10 include disabling outdated plug-ins by default and automatic malware reporting. However, this does not preclude the need for adequate, up-to-date security software on your system. Password sync is also now enabled by default as a part of Chrome's synchronisation feature.

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. Two 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.

Google has claimed that Chrome 10 is 66 per cent faster than Chrome 9, and CNET benchmarks will be added here soon. Historically, Chrome has been one of the top three fastest browsers available across multiple benchmarks and that's not expected to change in version 10.

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 true. 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.

Via Download.com

• Google Chrome 4
• Google Chrome 8
• Safari 4
• Opera 11

• Usable, uncluttered interface
• Solid although not stellar benchmarks
• Feature set keeps it at the forefront of Windows security

• We'd like to see stronger efficacy benchmarks

Avast made great strides in its previous update. Version 5 set the stage for the modern, massively popular and free security suite with a new interface that ditched a quirky, late-'90s jukebox style for a more polished look. Easier to navigate, it also became easier to add new features.

Make no mistake, Avast 6 adds features both big and small. Some that had previously only been available to paid upgrade users are now free for all versions and newer features have been seamlessly added to the interface experience. If you're familiar with Avast 5, upgrading to Avast 6 won't be that big of a leap.

Installation

Installing Avast is a painless process that compares well against its free competitors like AVG, although like those competitors, it's much slower than installing paid programs like Trend Micro, Kaspersky or Norton.

Some items of note during the installation that will come up later in the review: to completely avoid the new Windows 7 and Vista desktop gadget, or the new WebRep browser add-on, you must choose the Custom install option and uncheck those here.

Automatic installation of these features is frowned upon, although Avast does provide a clear method for uninstalling them. It's just not as simple as a check box that gets its own installation window, since you have to go through the Customize menu, which makes the auto-install sort of surreptitious.

On the plus side, installing Avast doesn't require a reboot and using its uninstall tool we detected no remnants in the Registry or on the desktop. Avast has said that the installer has shrunk for all three versions by about 20 per cent, although it's still a large download at around 57MB for the free version.

Interface

Avast 6's interface is virtually identical to the previous version's. Perhaps the most major change, aside from a slight lightening of the grey in the colour scheme, is the removal of the Windows Explorer-style forward and backward buttons. We actually liked those, since they made it easy to return to a previous pane, no matter how deeply into the settings you had explored.

The only other change is the addition of the Additional Protection tab to the left nav area, which hosts the new AutoSandbox and WebRep feature controls.

For users new to Avast, the sleek user interface is a change that came at the end of 2009. The grey and orange colour scheme stands out well on the screen and the tab-based navigation on the left makes it easy to navigate between features. Highlighted with the familiar security colours of green for safe and red for dangerous, the Summary tab gives up-to-date info on shield status, auto-updates, virus definitions, the program version and whether the silent/gaming mode is on. There's also an unobtrusive ad urging you to upgrade to Avast Internet Security 6.

The Summary tab contains a second sub-menu, Statistics. If you're curious to see how Avast's shields have been performing against threats, here's where you can get your maths geek on. For each shield, it tells you how many files were scanned and when, and presents the data in a concise graph.

Avast 6 keeps its interface from Avast 5 and adds features both big and small. Some that had previously only been available to paid upgrade users are now free for all versions, and newer features have been seamlessly added to the interface experience. If you're familiar with Avast 5, upgrading to Avast 6 won't be that big of a leap. (Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

The scans live in the second tab, where you can choose and adjust four default scan types plus a custom scan option nestled into the bottom right corner. Real-time shields live in the third tab, and again the clean interface comes into play here as navigating what could be a mess of options and tweaks is instead dead simple. Click on a shield to reveal a real-time chart of what the program's been defending you against, with a Stop button and settings options at the top of the window. Another button at the top takes you to the advanced settings for that shield and links at the bottom expose the shield's history as a graph and export a log file.

Below the Additional Protection tab, which we covered above, the Maintenance tab contains the virus chest and manual update buttons. On the top right of the interface live the Help Center and the Settings, from which you can get much more granular control of Avast. This includes everything from toggling the system tray icon to managing updates to password-protecting Avast access. This is also where you can "uninvolve" your anonymously submitted data from Community IQ, the Avast crowdsourced behavioural detection engine.

One last change: a green Like Avast button has been added to the bottom of the left nav that expedites your Avast-related social networking. Fortunately, it's unobtrusive.

Features and support

As mentioned, the two big new features in the free version of Avast 6 are the AutoSandbox and the WebRep add-on. The debut of the AutoSandbox makes Avast the second antivirus option to offer a sandboxing tool for free. Competitor Comodo introduced a sandboxing tool in January 2010. Avast's sandbox probably works differently, as Comodo has a pending patent on its version. And certainly, one of the most frustrating things about sandboxing technology is that there are some indications that it doesn't work perfectly.

The AutoSandbox, new in both free and paid Avast versions, automatically places suspicious programs in a virtualised state when it suspects them of being threats. As the program runs, the sandbox keeps track of file behaviours and what it reads and writes from the Registry. Permanent changes are virtualised, so when the process terminates itself, the system changes it made will evaporate. (Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

Avast's version automatically places programs in a virtualised state when it suspects them of being threats. It walls off suspicious programs, preventing them from potentially damaging your system while allowing them to run. As the program runs, Avast's sandbox keeps track of which files are opened, created or renamed, and what it reads and writes from the Registry. Permanent changes are virtualised, so when the process terminates itself, the system changes it made will evaporate.

The company hasn't said whether the virtualised state begins after the program already has access to your system, so it's theoretically possible that it could be compromised. There's not a single security feature in any program that hasn't been compromised at some point, though, so "theoretically hackable" is true of all security features.

The AutoSandbox is different from Avast's paid-upgrade sandbox, and the paid upgrades to Avast Pro and Avast Internet Security include both the automatic version and the older, manually initiated version.

You can access the AutoSandbox settings from the new Additional Protection option on the left nav. It defaults to asking the user whether a program should be sandboxed, although you can set it to automatically decide. There's a whitelist option for programs that you always want to exclude from the sandbox and you can deactivate the feature entirely.

Avast 6 also marks the debut of the program joining (or succumbing to) the browser-security add-on, with the new WebRep. Security add-ons have a long-standing word-of-mouth reputation for decreasing browser performance, although Internet Explorer 9 Release Candidate's impact meter pegs Avast's plug-in at 0.07 second, well below the threshold of 0.2 second that IE uses as the default upper limit for browser performance impact.

WebRep works with IE and Firefox out of the box, and Avast says it plans to release a Chrome version soon. It supports a search result ranking and website reputation service that uses a combination of data from Avast's virus labs and user voting to determine a safety score for a site. User voting is a crapshoot for many security vendors, although Avast is known for its vast user base and their passionate support of the program, so the company's plans to give users incentives to vote could easily work in its favour. And make no mistake, Avast fans are truly fanatics: Avast Free has an average 4.5-star rating from Download.com readers, extremely unusual for a program with more than 15,000 votes.

It's important to note that the add-on installs to both Firefox and IE as you install Avast 6. If you don't want it, it's surprisingly easier to remove from within Avast instead of from within the browser. Currently, removing the add-on using the browser's interface will cue Avast to reinstall the add-on the next time the computer is rebooted.

Many of Avast 6's small improvements are worth noting as well. The Troubleshooting section now comes with a "restore factory settings" option, which makes it easier to wipe settings back to a familiar starting point, and comes with the option to restore only the Shields settings, leaving other changes untouched, like permanently running in silent mode. There's a new sidebar gadget for Windows 7 and Vista, and you now can set automatic actions for the boot-time scan. Available under the Scan Computer tab, the boot-time scan customisations give you far more flexibility in managing the lengthy and time-consuming boot scan.

Two features that have trickled down to the free version in Avast 6 are the Script Shield and site blocking. The Script Shield now works with Internet Explorer 8 and 9's protected mode.

Avast doesn't offer an on-demand link-scanning feature, like AVG or Norton do, although the company says that the way that Avast's web shield behaves ought to protect you automatically from any malicious URLs by automatically preventing the URL from resolving in-browser. A page will appear letting you know that Avast has blocked the site because it is suspected to contain a threat.

If you're running Avast Pro Antivirus 6 or Avast Internet Security 6, the big new feature is the introduction of SafeZone, a virtualisation feature that the company envisions people using for secure online banking. The basic difference between SafeZone and AutoSandbox is that the sandbox is designed to allow suspicious activity to run within a safe, walled-off, easily discarded environment, while SafeZone is the opposite. SafeZone creates a secure space that, ideally, prevents threats from getting in.

SafeZone is accessible from the right-click Windows Explorer context menu, from the middle icon in the Windows 7/Vista desktop gadget, and from the Additional Protection tab in the Avast interface.

The difference between Avast Free and Avast Pro is that Pro gets the SafeZone, whereas Avast Internet Security differentiates itself by including SafeZone, anti-spam measures and a firewall.

If you're new to Avast, the core features are what make it one of the best security suites around. The antivirus, anti-spyware and heuristics engines form a security core that also includes multiple real-time shields. The adjustable mail and file system shields join the pre-existing behaviour, network, instant-messaging, peer-to-peer and web shields. The behavioural shield is a common-sense feature, as security software publishers draw on their large user bases to detect threats early and warn others.

Other features include a gaming mode that can be used to permanently "silence" Avast notifications, and an "intelligent scanner" that only looks at changed files after establishing a baseline.

Program scans live in the second tab, where you can choose and adjust four default scan types plus a custom scan option. What's useful about Avast's layout here is that you can adjust all Avast-related scans from this tab. This includes Quick and Full scans, the Removable Media scan and the Folder scan. In a polite turn, running a scan does not prevent you from exploring the rest of the program.

You can also schedule a boot-time scan and access scan logs from the scan tab. While running a scan, Avast will tell you not only how long the scan has taken and how many files have been examined, but also how much data has been tested and how fast it's being tested. As with the summary graphs, Avast exposes a lot of data here.

Performance

All the security features in the world do you no good if they don't keep you safe, and on that count Avast performs well in general. However, as results from independent efficacy testing groups indicate, Avast could be better.

AV-Test.org gave Avast 5, the previous version of Avast, a passing rating in its most recent test, on a Windows Vista computer from the fourth quarter of 2010. Avast 5 barely surpassed the minimum score of 12, notching 13 out of 18. It reached 3.5 out of 6 in Protection, 4.0 out of 6 in Repair, and a 5.5 out of 6 in Usability. Many other suites scored the same or higher, including F-Secure, Kaspersky, Norton and Panda. Among its free competitors during the fourth-quarter test, Avast scored better on the key metric of Protection than Microsoft Security Essentials 1.0, but worse on Protection than Avira 10.0 (4.0 out of 6) and AVG 10.0 (4.5 out of 6).

AV-Comparatives.org, on the other hand, showed progressively better scores for Avast from August 2010 through November 2010 on its "whole product" test. However, Avast's cumulative rate of blocking threats was 96.4 per cent, below AVG's cumulative 97.1 per cent and Avira's 98.7 per cent. Still, the positive improvements in the last two months indicate that Avast has been adapting to changes in the threatscape - never a bad thing. Overall, Avast earned an Advanced certification, along with seven others, including AVG. An Advanced+ certification was earned by four others, including Avira.

Dennis Labs' most recent evaluation of Avast occurred back in August 2010, when the lab scored Avast 5 at 93 per cent and above the 87.5 per cent average for that test. It was the only free antivirus application to do so. Other above-average scores were reached by G Data, Eset, Kaspersky and Norton, which scored 100 per cent on Dennis Labs' test.

Judging from these results, Avast is clearly one of the best security products around, although there's definitely room for it to improve.

As far as Avast's impact on system performance goes, in a real-world test Avast completed its scans in a timely yet not blazingly fast manner. A Quick Scan took about 20 minutes, and the Full Scan took 59 minutes. CNET Labs' benchmarks will be added here as they become available, and may affect the final score of the product. You can read more on how CNET Labs benchmarks security software.

RAM usage was surprisingly light, with Avast 6 only eating up about 16MB when running a scan.

Conclusion

When it comes to your security, Avast Free Antivirus 6 gets a lot right. It's got a usable, uncluttered interface, solid although not stellar benchmarks, and a set of features that keeps it at the forefront of Windows security. Using the Internet safely is no longer just about not getting phished and downloading only known-safe files, and the improvements in Avast 6 address modern security risks comprehensively.

Although we'd like to see stronger efficacy benchmarks in the future, Avast remains one of the best free security options around and is well worth downloading.

Via Download.com

• PC Tools Internet Security 8.0
• Microsoft Security Essentials
• Ad-Aware Free Internet Security 9.0

uTorrent Remote for Android(Credit: BitTorrent, Inc)

The Android app adds basic torrent remote controls to your phone. You can check the status of a download or upload, and add, start, pause or remove torrents, including torrents from RSS feeds. The big feature that makes this app a must is that it allows you to transfer, save and play back any completed file from your PC to your Android device. In other words, there goes your data cap.

To use it, after installing uTorrent 3.0 alpha you must go to the web section of the uTorrent preferences and choose a username and password, then enter those in to the uTorrent Remote app. The app comes with buttons for viewing all your torrents, and then filtering by active downloads, currently seeding and completed torrents. You can customise labels for your torrents and add RSS feeds - an excellent way to stay on top of podcasts, for example.

Tap on a torrent and you're provided with a detailed list of torrenting information, including status, download and upload speed, size of the files and the amount downloaded. Controls at the bottom are for cancelling the torrent, pausing it and viewing the files. Tapping the folder icon takes you to a list of the files in the torrent and you can select on the fly which ones to copy to your phone. Once you've copied it to your phone, a process that depends heavily on signal strength and the size of the file, the icon changes to a playback arrow.

Note that just because you can transfer the file to your phone doesn't mean that your phone has the ability to play it back, and uTorrent doesn't include a file conversion tool.

As a side note, uTorrent's parent company, BitTorrent, has also been promoting its free content site Vodo as a place where people can get legally distributed torrents. All this combined with hardware partners for later in the year indicates a strong push from BitTorrent to convert the torrent from a tool of theft in the eyes of many to an expedient way to get content.

• BitTorrent plans torrenting ecosystem, hardware partnerships
• uTorrent 2.0
• Windows Starter Kit 2010: Must-have PC apps
• HDI Dune BD Prime 3.0

Google's new web-based Android Market. (Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

Having an Android device isn't required to access the new marketplace, although you obviously won't be able to install apps without one. To get started, visit the market and log in using your Google account, the same as the one you use for your phone or tablet. You can browse app categories on the left, or filter by tabs showcasing featured apps, top paid apps and top free apps.

One of the keys with the Market is to log in using the same account that's been associated with your mobile device, since your apps are now synced directly to that Gmail account.

Once logged in, there's very little that's different to visually indicate that you've successfully logged in. You can tell, though, because the upper right corner of the web page will show your email address and a link to "My Market Account". Click it and you're taken to a My Orders tab that lists all your installed apps. These are organised by date last updated, the name of the app, category, price and status. Currently, these headings can only be sorted by date, although it looks like the kind of layout that will receive an update with more sort parameters in the future.

A second tab labelled Settings currently shows only a list of the devices associated with your account. It shows Nickname, Visibility, Make, Model, Carrier, Last used and Registered on date. Clicking the Edit button on the right lets you give the device a nickname and choose whether to hide the device from Android menus. Users who have rooted their devices and are running custom ROMs will not see data for Make and Model.

Click through for a photo tour of the new Android Market.
(Credit: Screenshots by Bonnie Cha/CNET)

It appears that multiple, simultaneous account log-ins, a feature recently pushed to Gmail, are not supported.

At the top of the new Market lives a persistent and slick search option. Enter a query and a black bar appears between the bottom of the search box and your results. Click it to reveal search filters to narrow your results. You can install an app directly from the results, or click through to learn more about each app. When you do hit the install link, the Market will let you choose which device to install the app to, as well as show you a list of permissions that the app uses and its cost. You can also push an app to multiple devices as long as they're associated under the same account.

Previously, the app-to-account sync and push had only been available through third-party markets. The new Android Market does lack features that third-party markets like AppBrain offer, such as customised app lists and uninstallation.

Via Download.com

• Toshiba AC100
• Android Market web store: photo tour
• HTC Desire HD
• Desktop Android Market to sync apps wirelessly