Battle between the browsers

The battle of the browsers is heating up this week, with Microsoft for the final version of Internet Explorer 9, Firefox of Firefox 4 and Google releasing Chrome 10 .

Switching browsers is not a decision to take lightly, and as Chrome has improved over the last couple years, had a harder time considering other options.

The most noticeable change in Chrome 10 is the Options settings, and they'll be welcomed by tweakers and anyone who ever changes Chrome options. When you click the gear icon in the upper-right corner and select Options (Preferences on a Mac), the menu now opens in its own tab rather than in a relatively small window, as with previous releases, making it easier to find the options you want to change.

More important is that you can now search through Options, so you don't have to hunt around for the feature you want to change. For example, if you want to make changes to any settings related to downloads or passwords, type in one of those terms, and you'll be sent directly to those settings.

As you use Options, the Omnibox (Google's name for the address bar) displays a local URL for your location -- for example, chrome://settings/advanced for advanced settings and chrome://settings/browser for basic settings. In some instances, an individual Option feature or setting will have its own URL, such as chrome://settings/passwordManager for the Password Manager. You can add this to your bookmarks if it's a feature you frequently use, which I found very convenient.

Web Store and Web Apps
Since Google in December, people taken a liking to the whole concept. It's part a discovery tool for new web services, part and part quick launch tool from Chrome's home screen. The Web Store is a case where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and now it's something we can't do without. We'll see if when it releases its own web apps platform.

Pinned Tabs
Although IE9 lets you pin tabs to the taskbar in Windows 7, it doesn't let you pin tabs within the browser itself. Both Chrome and Firefox allow this, so your favorite websites can hide in a tiny corner at the top of the browser. The difference is control: Firefox doesn't give you a way to automatically open certain websites as pinned tabs, but with Chrome, any web app can be pinned whenever you launch it from the home screen.

Real Estate
Technically, Internet Explorer 9 affords the most screen real estate for web pages, but it only does so by squeezing tabs and the address/search bar onto the same line. This feels too claustrophobic, and moving tabs down to a separate line consumes a lot more space. Firefox 4 comes close to Chrome, but it's not quite equal.

Bookmarks Bar
I visit a lot of websites on a regular basis, such as news sources and blogging tools, so the bookmarks bar in Chrome is essential. Again, this is a feature that Firefox also offers, but it takes up a little more space than Chrome and lacks a shortcut to toggle the bar on and off (in Chrome, Shift-Ctrl-B).