Product Reviews

Firefox may have grabbed the headlines with its slick interface, but Microsoft and Opera are striking back with Internet Explorer 7 (IE 7) and Opera 9, both currently available as feature-complete betas. Internet Explorer 7 looks different to IE 6, while Opera 9 is similar to its predecessor.

IE 7's interface has been pared back and the browsing pane is much bigger, so you can fit more of a web page on your display without reverting to full-screen mode. The clunky navigation buttons have been made smaller and positioned intelligently to the side of the address bar, which itself has moved to the top of the application window. All classic menu functions have been moved to a tools button, freeing up more space, and the Favorites pane is now easier to access. IE 7 joins Opera 9 in having a dedicated search in the toolbar. This allows you to search using the most popular engines without actually visiting them.

Like Opera and Firefox, Internet Explorer finally has tabbed browsing. Instead of opening every new page in a new browser window, pages are opened in the same window under a new tab. While Opera 9 now provides mouse-over previews of each tab, IE 7 has a separate and more useful preview pane, which shows miniature versions of every loaded page. This makes it

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easier to navigate between multiple tabs without losing your way. IE 7 always has an empty tab waiting, whereas Opera and Firefox make you explicitly open a new tab, which is rather cumbersome. Unlike Opera, you cannot tile or cascade tabs in IE 7 or Firefox.

Both Opera 9 and IE 7 have integrated RSS clients so you can receive updated news from your favourite sites direct to your browser. IE 7 manages feeds in the same ways as favourites. They are easy to find, navigate through and update, and feed content is displayed on an HTML page complete with individual item categories. Opera 9, on the other hand, uses a separate feeds menu to select and manage your feeds and content is displayed in its mail client. IE7's approach is cleaner and more powerful.

In addition to standard web tools, Opera has native support for BitTorrent. You can search for, download and open Torrents from within the browser. This makes the peer-to-peer file-sharing platform much more accessible to non-technical users. Opera has also created a separate environment for small web applications that it calls Widgets. These can operate outside the browser window on your desktop. Although only clocks, calendars and a search tool are currently available, Opera hopes their simplicity will encourage users to program their own.

In an attempt to keep up with the improved security offered by Opera and Firefox, Microsoft has introduced a phishing filter. However, IE 7 Protected Mode relies on the architecture of Windows Vista, so is unavailable to XP users.

Until this incarnation, Opera and Firefox were noticeably superior to Internet Explorer on all fronts, but IE 7 has caught up. If you want a simple, effective interface and intelligent browser, IE 7 fits the bill, but if you are more concerned with browser bells and whistles, Opera and Firefox are still the best options.