As you all may know, Safari 4, Chrome 2.0, Firefox 3.0.7,
and Internet Explorer 8 have all become available for download within the
last month.
After playing around with each, I’m going to summarize the best
points/changes for each and then award the titles of “Most Interactive”,
“Least Likely to Crash”, “Most Fashionable”, “Fastest Browser”, and
Reviewer’s Personal Favorite.

Please note that I am only one person, and I don’t have the capabilities to
do mass testing, but I spent one hour on each browser using them on various
types of entertainment, news, flash media, and social networking sites. For
more thorough reviews, I recommend visiting the website featured for each
browser.

Safari 4 Public Beta - Released February 24th
http://ping.fm/0Qf84
+ Very quick site loading.
+ You Tube Videos and other Flash applications hardly take any time to load.
+ Most Viewed and History have the delightful iTunesish showcase.
+ Click & Drag Bookmark Creation
- Tabs Can’t Be Reordered.
- No History or Reload Buttons on the main control bar.
- Crashes if you pause a Youtube video for more than five minutes.
- Crashes occasionally when attemptly to print or copy & paste into another
application.
- Bug Report button is on the browser itself and you have to remember what
happened to describe it to Apple when the browser reloads.

Firefox 3.0.7 - Released March 4th
http://ping.fm/BnBbS
+ They fixed several bugs that caused 3.0.3 to crash frequently like when
you would try to print something.
+ They increased some security issues.
- They are using this as a teaser product to entice us away from
downloading the other browsers while they continue working on their private
3.1 beta, that will eventually be released as Firefox 3.5.
+ No new cool features, they still rely heavily on third party add-ons, many
of which affect the speed of the browser.

Chrome 2.0 Public Beta - Released March 18th
http://ping.fm/91LXa
+ Second Fastest in browsing speed.
+ The only time it crashed, a Report Issue Window came up that offered to
take a screenshot of what happened right before the crash and the form was
simple and quick to fill out.
+ Incognito Windows - You may have no need to hide a site visit from your
surfing, but I can see where it may come in handy and the name is cool.
+ The most interactive tabs I’ve yet to see. You can reorder them, select
links and drag up to create new tabs, and you can drag tabs out of the tab
bar to create a new window. New windows, can also be dragged back into the
original tab bar.
+ No crashing when printing or when leaving a youtube video on pause
overnight.
+ A separate listing on history for recently closed tabs.
+ The ability to save profiles for home, work, and play (this can also be
done via an add-on in Firefox)
+ Click and Drag Bookmark creation.
+ If a Web site has an issue and causes the browser to crash, only the tab
that was viewing that Web site crashes, not all 11 tabs.
- Very Plain looking history page and no screenshot of the Web site in
question.
- It was the only browser that crashed upon startup during my tests.

Internet Explorer 8.0 - Released March 19th
http://ping.fm/lR4ER
+ You can now reorder the tabs, make them different colors, and open a new
tab by clicking a link and dragging up to the tab bar.
+ Improved security features.
- This was the slowest to load of all the browsers when visiting flash
sites, but still faster than IE 7.
- This crashed multiple times during testing, so many times, I forgot what
caused the issue in the first place at times.

Now for the Awards… (drum roll please)

Most Interactive = Chrome 2.0 Public Beta
Fastest Browser = Safari 4 Public Beta
Most Fashionable = Safari 4 Public Beta
Least Likely to Crash = Chrome 2.0 Public Beta
Reviewer’s Personal Favorite = Chrome 2.0 Public Beta

Congratulations to all the Winners and Happy Browsing!!!