The most recent articles from vnunet.com

Review: Mozilla Firefox 3.5

Ian Williams — 2009-07-02T13:49:00.000Z

Ian Williams, V3.co.uk, Thursday 2 July 2009 at 13:49:00

V3.co.uk gets hands on with Mozilla's latest web browser to see if it lives up to the hype

The browser wars continue to rage, and Mozilla's latest iteration of Firefox introduces a slew of new features and improvements to up the ante.

Probably the most noticeable addition in Firefox 3.5 is the inclusion of Private Mode, a feature already available in most of today's popular browsers - it's called Incognito in Google Chrome and InPrivate Browsing in Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8. The feature allows users to surf the internet with a greater degree of anonymity as no local data from the session, including history, cache files, form data, passwords or searches, is kept on the machine.

Private Mode can be activated from the Tools menu. It closes all existing windows and begins the new Private session with a clean slate. Once the Private Mode is stopped the previous session and all its tabs are automatically restored. While this removes any confusion about what is running under Private Mode and what is not, it can be frustrating if you need any information from a previous window when entering Private Mode.

Users also now have a lot more control over data that has already been stored locally, as it is now possible to clear recent history from the past hour, two hours, four hours or day, as well as erasing all history as per normal. Similarly, from the history library users can also opt to 'forget about this site' and remove all reference to a particular site. It should be noted that sub-domains are not affected, so 'forgetting' about maps.google.com, for example, won't affect anything from mail.google.com.

Mozilla has also done a lot of work on tab management with Firefox 3.5, making it easier to sort tabs. This includes a new feature called 'Tab Tearing' whereby users can reorder tabs within a window, and move them between windows as well. 'Tearing off' a tab and dropping it on the desktop will cause it to be opened in its own window, while if the last remaining tab in a window is moved to another, the empty window will automatically close.

Firefox 3.5 includes location awareness, allowing different online services to find your location based on information about your internet connection. The system uses any information to hand to pinpoint your whereabouts, be it your IP address, nearby Wi-Fi signal information and 3G data if it is available. The results will vary depending on the connection. For instance, someone on a 3G data connection will get their location pinpointed quite accurately, while someone on a wired local area network connection connected to a larger company wide area network will get only a very rough estimate. In general, we found it got a location down to within a few blocks, which should be accurate enough for most location-based services.

Although this feature will be of limited use to desktop PC users, it could be very handy to laptop users and will be ported into mobile versions of Firefox such as Fen nec where it could prove a lot more useful.

One of Firefox's most useful features is the ability to easily recover recently closed tabs, helping to fix those moments when you accidentally close a tab you still need. This has now been extended to include recently closed windows and all their associated tabs, which is perfect for those moments when the wrong click of the mouse or a mistype could mean losing something important.

There are a slew of other smaller tweaks that have been included in Firefox 3.5, over 5,000 if you include minute changes such as altering the text in a dialogue box to make it clearer. For instance, the browser's Awesome bar, which provides suggestions as users type into the address bar based on history and bookmarks, can now also be refined with the inclusion of different command keys.

The session restore will also remember any form data that has been entered but not yet committed. If a user is in the middle of an email on their webmail service, for example, and needs to close the browser before they are done, the text they have entered will still be there when the session is restored.

Mozilla developers have also done a lot of work under the hood to boost Firefox's performance. These enhancements are a little harder to test, but include the TraceMonkey JavaScript and full HTML5 support among others. Dynamic content such as webmail, Flash applications or streaming video all feel a lot slicker and smoother, and the changes will go a long way to helping support new online services and technologies as they emerge.

Add-ons are one of the most popular features in Firefox as they allow users to customise the browser and to include a wide array of services and functions, but with over 6,000 available it can be difficult to find the ones you want. To help solve this problem Mozilla has introduced Collections, which allows people to create bundles of add-ons. This can help with the management of a collection, as well as assisting those who need to deploy the same configuration across multiple computers or who are looking for a group of compatible add-ons for personal use.

Mozilla has also implemented open codecs Ogg and Theora to help more deeply integrate video and other media into the browser without the need for proprietary codecs or plug-ins, which should help to generate an even more interactive web experience.

While many of the new additions to Firefox 3.5 are available in most of today's popular browsers, Mozilla is the first to implement an open-source media platform, which should open the floodgates for a much deeper embedding of rich content by web developers.

Whether Firefox 3.5 puts Mozilla ahead of its competitors is highly debatable, but what is certain is that the firm is listening to its users and delivering the types of features and functions they want, not just solving today's problems but trying to create an open platform for tomorrow's online world.

Tested: Opera 10 web browser beta

Daniel Robinson — 2009-06-10T13:00:00.000Z

Daniel Robinson, vnunet.com, Wednesday 10 June 2009 at 13:00:00

Some interesting new features, but little to tempt users away from Firefox or Internet Explorer

The beta release of Opera 10 shows that the company is generating its own browser innovations instead of trying to copy Firefox or Internet Explorer. With a slick new user interface and some interesting features, Opera 10 looks like it will be worth considering as an alternative to the two main contenders.

The Opera 10 beta was made available to download on 3 June for Windows, Mac and Linux users. We tried out the Windows version and were impressed with the polish of the application, which proved stable in our tests and feels more like a finished product than a beta.

We also found it very responsive, and it's the only browser we've tested that achieves a perfect score on the Acid3 test page from the Web Standards Project designed to test compliance.

On the downside, however, Opera 10 is hit by the same problems as other less widely used browsers, such as Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome, in that some web sites are still optimised for Internet Explorer or Firefox, and either do not display properly or reject it completely as an unsupported browser.

This seems to be mainly an issue with web-based business applications rather than the more commonly accessed sites on the web, few of which presented any difficulties.

The first thing you notice about Opera 10 beta is its striking but simple styling that sets it apart from Firefox and IE. It supports tabbed browsing, which Opera had long before Firefox and IE, and sports a set of VCR-like buttons for controlling navigation.

As well as Bookmarks, Opera 10 beta includes Speed Dial, a set of thumbnail links to web pages that appears when you open a new blank tab. This feature was introduced in Opera 9.2 but is now more customisable, allowing users to set a background image and how many Speed Dial thumbnails appear, or completely disable the feature.

Thumbnails of all open tabs can also be viewed by enlarging the tab bar near the top of the browser window.

The chief new feature in this beta is Opera Turbo, which is designed to speed up browsing over low-bandwidth connections. It does this by routing web requests through a proxy server, which compresses the data before sending it back to the browser. Turbo can be enabled or disabled manually - it is off by default - or set to kick in automatically if the browser detects a low-speed connection.

We tested Opera Turbo by using a mobile phone as a modem, linked to a laptop by a Bluetooth wireless connection. Without Turbo, browsing was agonisingly slow, while enabling it improved page load times significantly, although you also get some loss of graphic detail in images. While it was an improvement, we would hesitate to agree with Opera's claim that Turbo offers broadband-like speed over a dial-up connection.

Users new to Opera will find the Wand feature handy, which saves credentials for web sites that need a user name and password. Most browsers have similar functions, but the Wand seems to make it especially simple; if you open a page for which you have previously stored credentials, you can simply hit the 'forward' navigation button and Opera logs in for you.

However, while you can delete stored passwords from the Wand Manager, Opera still does not seem to have any way to let you edit them.

Opera supports plug-in applications called widgets, and there are a host of these available from the Opera Widgets site. Most of these are fairly whimsical, however, whereas Firefox has many genuinely useful add-ons that block adverts or let you control whether to view Flash content on pages.

Opera also includes a built-in email client and news feed readers, and now supports an automatic update feature in line with most of the major browsers on the market.

Overall, we were impressed with the beta of Opera 10 but, while the new browser is definitely worth checking out, it has few compelling features to tempt users who have already downloaded the current releases of Firefox or IE.

Review: Skyfire 1.0 mobile browser

Daniel Robinson — 2009-06-02T12:42:00.000Z

Daniel Robinson, vnunet.com, Tuesday 2 June 2009 at 12:42:00

Browser brings a desktop-like experience to smartphones, including Flash video

The Skyfire mobile browser is a free download designed to give smartphone users a web experience that as closely as possible matches that of accessing content from a PC.

Available to download now, Skyfire enables users to view almost any web page that can be viewed with a desktop browser, including those with Java and Flash content, such as videos on YouTube. It also supports Silverlight 2, making Skyfire potentially interesting for accessing web-based business applications.

We found the release version of Skyfire much improved in its speed of response over earlier betas, and it does indeed allow you to watch video from sites such as the BBC and vnunet.com on your handset.

On the downside, we found that using Skyfire can quickly eat up the battery life of the phone, and we also had to keep a close eye on how much the browser was using up our airtime plan.

Skyfire 1.0 supports a range of handsets based on Windows Mobile 5, 6 and 6.1, both touch-screen and keypad only, plus Symbian handsets with Nokia's S60 3rd Edition. The latter largely restricts Symbian support to Nokia's N and E series phones; Symbian-based devices from Samsung and LG are not supported, nor are phones with the UIQ user interface or earlier releases of S60.

We tested Skyfire on a HTC S730 handset, a phone with a slide-out Qwerty keyboard running Windows Mobile 6 Standard Edition.

Using the phone's built-in Internet Explorer browser, we downloaded the Skyfire installer, a 635Kb .CAB file, from m.skyfire.com. Users can also get the browser by visiting get.skyfire.com and downloading the files to their PC for synchronisation with their phone, or by having Skyfire send a link to their handset by SMS.

In use, we immediately noticed a number of changes over the earlier beta release. Firstly, the browser starts up faster, and you can also start keying a URL into the address bar while the rest of the front page loads.

The front page itself is a portal showing feeds from various sources. Skyfire comes with a number of pre-defined feeds from news and media sites, but users can customise these with updates from their Twitter or Facebook accounts, for example. The front page also has links to bookmarks and browsing history.

On our test handset, one of the buttons immediately below the screen accessed the browser menu, while the other displayed context-sensitive functions, typically serving as the back button while browsing.

As with other mobile browsers such as Safari on Apple's iPhone or the popular Opera Mini, Skyfire renders the web page as it would appear on a desktop PC browser. As this makes the text too small to be legible, the user typically has to select an area and zoom in to read it.

Like Opera Mini, Skyfire provides an on-screen mouse pointer that can be moved using the phone navigation key. An on-screen frame outlines the area that you would see if you zoom in.

In the release version of Skyfire you now double-click the navigation key to zoom in, but you can also highlight and click on links in the full-page view without having to zoom in first, saving a few seconds if you know where you want to go.

We found that web pages also load faster in this release than in the earlier betas, and the browser feels more responsive when you scroll and pan around the page. The browser still displays a checker board pattern when you scroll to an area of the page it has not yet cached, but Skyfire now catches up faster.

However, page loads still take longer than on a desktop PC, and obviously depend on the network connection. Users should expect to see a lot of the swirling circle, which Skyfire uses as its busy indicator.

Oddly, we found that pages did not load noticeably quicker when using our phone's Wi-Fi connection for browsing than when we had an HSDPA cellular connection. However, it was noticeably slower than either of those if we were in an area where the network connection downgraded to 3G or even GPRS.

But the most eye-catching feature of Skyfire is its ability to play video content. You can click on videos, and these play in place, just as you would expect on a PC. We found the videos would often start off a little jerky at first, but were otherwise very impressive.

An on-screen volume control appears whenever you play a video, allowing you to adjust the sound level, which always seemed to start off quite loud on our test handset.

However, there are some limitations. Windows Media content will play if it is embedded in the page, but not if it spawns a separate pop-up as Skyfire suppresses these. Skyfire supports Flash 10, Silverlight 2.0 and QuickTime, and the company said it intends to support more in the future.

We also tested Skyfire on several web-based applications, and found it generally worked very well for tools such as web mail. We were able to use Google Maps, and even managed to bring up Street View on the handset. However, we found a web-based blog editing tool we use displayed correctly but the drop-down menus did not function.

Like Opera Mini, Skyfire uses a proxy server to render web pages, rather than using the phone's processor to do the legwork. This also means that your browsing history and cookies are stored in Skyfire's datacentre rather than on the handset itself.

Overall, we were impressed with Skyfire. There are inevitably some things you can do on a desktop that you cannot replicate on a mobile handset, but Skyfire comes the closest to the desktop experience of any we have so far seen, and it's a free download.

Review: Mozilla Fennec mobile browser

Ian Williams — 2009-03-27T13:34:00.000Z

Ian Williams, vnunet.com, Friday 27 March 2009 at 13:34:00

Mobile version of Firefox hits the beta stage

Mozilla recently launched a beta version of Fennec, its new mobile web browser. This is still an early version for testing, and is currently available only for the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet. Nokia was kind enough to send one to us so that we could check out Mozilla's long awaited debut into the mobile web browser market.

The initial focus of Fennec development was on building a user experience that reflects Firefox's design principles. Not all the features that are set to be in the final release are available yet, but the majority are ready to go.

It's worth bearing in mind that the N810 doesn't have a SIM card in it and only connects over Wi-Fi, so some of the usual problems with surfing the internet over a mobile data connection aren't going to be reflected here.

Firing up Fennec presents you with a nice clean Google search bar, surrounded by a few logos for Mozilla and Nokia. This looks pretty impressive on the N810's big touch screen, and will be even more appreciated on smaller devices. You can change the default home page if you want but, unlike Firefox 3, the home page is limited to a single site.

A slight change is that the address bar is at the bottom. This might be specific to the N810, but it works well. The address bar also includes all the functionality of Mozilla's 'Awesome Bar' which, although poorly named, searches through history, tags and bookmarks when you begin typing.

Search terms can be entered straight into the address bar, and the closest matching page will automatically be loaded. Combined with the N810's predictive text, you can usually enter the address very quickly.

Like many touch-screen interfaces, the equivalent of a right click is perfor med by touching and holding on the screen for a few seconds to bring up the context-sensitive menu. This allows you to open links in a new window, copy and paste text and so on.

Bookmarks are handled in pretty much the same way as any other browser. Currently bookmark folders are not supported, but this is another feature that's set to be included in the full release version.

According to Mozilla, a lot of work has been done on the front-end code and a number of optimisations to the platform have been made to speed up panning, scrolling and zooming.

Rendering of even fairly complex pages is excellent and very speedy The work that has been done really shows, as navigating around web pages is smooth and easy. It is quick even when loading Flash videos, and playback is generally pretty smooth provided the memory is not already being pushed to the limit.

There are a number of zoom options, depending on what you're most comfortable with, including the ability to fit the width of the page to the view to the window. This can do strange things to the page layout, but in general does help to make it more easily readable on a smaller device.

What it does lack is any kind of intelligent zooming such as in Opera Mobile where double tapping on the screen zooms to the width of the frame tapped in. This is not a big problem on something with the screen size of the N810, but could be an issue on smaller devices. The address and menu bars can be made to disappear from sight when not in use to help maximise the screen space.

Standalone images are automatically resized to fit the screen, but a simple click on the image will show its full resolution.

To help speed up page loading, there are options available to load images, run JavaScript and load components such as Flash. JavaScript in Fennec is handled by Mozilla's TraceMonkey JavaScript engine that the firm is using in the development of Firefox 3.1, so it has all the same performance improvements, which are particularly noticeable in a mobile environment.

Unlike Opera Mobile, there does not appear to be a limit to the number of windows you can have open. However, when the device begins to run low on memory, new pages cannot be loaded. On the N810, with no other applications running, we were able to get six fairly normal pages, but this will depend a lot on the type of content on each site and the capabilities of the specific device.

One of Firefox's biggest attractions is its wide-ranging collection of add-ons. Unfortunately, while add-ons are set to be included in Fennec, the current beta version does not support them. Similarly, we don't know whether existing Firefox add-ons will port to Fennec, or whether we'll have to wait for developers to write new ones.

There are, however, a few plug-ins already included which add support for playback of multimedia such as RealPlayer, Flash and Windows Media files. Loading Flash-based content was quick and, as mentioned earlier, playback was smooth. There is also a pop-up blocker installed, so you can avoid most of the annoying ads while checking out your favourite sites.

Fennec also includes a location-seeking API, which could allow web applications such as mapping or social networking sites to tap into the device's GPS to obtain the user's current location, allowing searches to be more context-sensitive.

It also has the ability to dial numbers automatically detected within websites, although on the N810 this is a little redundant as there is no mobile phone support. However, it can be done through VoIP applications like Skype and will be easy to use in other mobile devices that incorporate SIM cards.

We liked what we've seen of Fennec so far, but Apple has set a very high standard with the iPhone's Safari browser, and Mobile Opera and the likes of Skyfire are taking up market share at a rapid rate and adding a host of features and optimisations.

Mozilla is going to have get something out soon for several platforms if it wants to have nearly the same level of uptake as it's seen on the desktop.

First Look: Firefox 3.1 beta 3

Ian Williams — 2009-03-17T16:50:00.000Z

Ian Williams, vnunet.com, Tuesday 17 March 2009 at 16:50:00

Latest version offers new privacy, search and tab management tools

Mozilla has just released the third beta version of its latest Firefox open-source browser, showcasing some of the upcoming features expected in Firefox 3.5.

The majority of changes appear to be on the back end, but there a few new things to look out for from a user perspective, including a 'private browsing' mode and easier tab management, as well as the ability to use special characters when navigating the smart address bar.

There are also a number of changes behind the scenes for web developers and extension creators. Developers have been given a host of new tools to play with, including the ability to test a site under development with the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine to see how much faster it runs.

Extension developers, meanwhile, will have a new feature allowing them to test existing add-ons to ensure compatibility with the latest version of Firefox.

Installing this beta release will not overwrite previous versions of the browser, so if you're running Firefox 2.0 or 3.0 you will have two versions installed. This is to ensure that, should the beta throw up some fatal flaw, users will still have access to a previously tested and known version.

For those early adopters also using the beta of Microsoft's Windows 7, the Enter key no longer appears to have any effect when typing in a web address, even when selecting an address from the drop down list. Similarly, Ctrl+Enter doesn't add a 'www.' and '.com' at the beginning and end of text typed into the address field.

The most significant addition to Firefox is probably the inclusion of the private browsing mode, which is turned on by selecting 'Start Private Browsing' from the Tools menu. Any already open tabs or windows will be closed when the session is initiated.

While in private browsing mode no history of visited pages will be remembered, nothing entered into a search bar or text entry field will be added to the auto-complete list and no new passwords will be saved. According to the release notes, passwords should not be automatically filled in when in private browsing mode, but they always were when we tested it.

Cookies or other temporary files will be used during the private browsing session, but will be deleted once the session is ended. Anything downloaded will be removed from the download list, but the files themselves will remain, as will any bookmarks created during the private browsing session.

You can end the private browsing session by closing all open Firefox windows, or selecting 'Stop Private Browsing' from the Tools menu. The latter will then close all existing windows and tabs, and reopen any sites that were closed when the private session was started.

Mozilla has also added a privacy option called 'Clear Recent History' which builds on the 'Clear Private Data' feature available in the current version of Firefox. This allows users to clear existing browsing, saved form and search history as well as cache, cookies, offline web site data, saved passwords and authenticated sessions.

The new version offers the same feature, but with the addition of a time factor allowing users to remove data from the past hour, two hours, four hours, that day or the entire history.

Another new end-user feature is 'tab tearing', which allows you to drag tabs off the bar to automatically open that site in a new window. This process can also be reversed, allowing a tab to be dragged from one Firefox window to another. Should the last tab in one window be moved to another, the initial window will be closed.

This is a very useful feature for those who have a lot of sites open at the same time, particularly when combined with Firefox's existing ability to reorder tabs by dragging them around the tab bar.

There are currently some issues around the tab tearing feature when dragging the tab onto the desktop; in some cases this creates a shortcut to that URL on the desktop and in others it opens the tab in a new window. There is also some debate going on in the developer forums about what the default behaviour should be.

Dragging a tab out to the desktop in our tests always opened a new window, in both Windows 7 and XP.

Mozilla has also made some changes to the smart location bar which now allows surfers to use special characters to help narrow the results returned when typing into the address bar. By adding characters such as '^', '*' or '+', search results can be restricted to the history, bookmarks or tagged pages respectively. Other special characters are set to included as development continues.

A few tweaks have been made under the hood that allow users to watch a video in the browser without needing any plug-ins or external media players and to load page content faster.

Although this is purely anecdotal evidence, we timed how long it took to load 11 sites from a variety of sources, running it three times on each version. Firefox 3.0.7 took an average of 61 seconds to load all the pages, while the new beta took an average of 54 seconds. So it certainly appears that the developers have improved page load times a little.

For those who don't want to wait and have decided to install this beta, it's worth remembering that some normal extensions and add-ons may not work. There are also a few known bugs already listed, such as the 'tab tearing' issues mentioned earlier, and when going from the private browsing mode back to normal mode, some sites that are secured with SSL will not load properly until they are restarted.

Furthermore, Google Mail will sometimes fail to respond when creating a new filter, showing advanced search options or clearing the spam folder, but refreshing the page will fix this.

We'll be doing a full review of the new browser once all the kinks have been ironed out and it becomes generally available as Firefox 3.5.

First look: Apple Safari 4 beta

Will Stapley — 2009-03-03T12:26:00.000Z

Will Stapley, vnunet.com, Tuesday 3 March 2009 at 12:26:00

Apple looks to tempt Mac and Windows users with a speedy and attractive browser

The latest version of Apple's web browser, Safari 4, is now in public beta stage. An attractive yet resource-light browser, its most eye-catching feature is undoubtedly the Top Sites screen. Displaying large thumbnails of your most visited sites - you can adjust the number it shows - is a useful addition, and serves as a good starting point for web browsing.

The Top Sites are not live screenshots, but are regularly updated and, should a web site have new content, a small star appears in the top right-corner. During testing, we noticed a couple of problems where certain sites showed garbled text instead of a preview, or took well over a minute to load, but this is a beta release and it's something that should be ironed out.

Safari 4 also features an innovative way to view your browsing history, bookmarks and more. Using a slider, you can flick through pages in the same way as Cover Flow in iTunes and the latest iPods. It looks fancy, but it's much more than just a gimmick - actually seeing the web pages you've visited is a much better way to navigate than simply looking at a list of titles as in Internet Explorer.

Much like in Google's Chrome, the tabs for individual browser windows have shifted to the top, above the address bar. In these days of small-screen netbooks, this makes perfect sense as it allows more space for the site you're actually viewing. The only real downside to having the tabs right at the top is that it's a little too easy to accidentally close one when you're simply trying to drag the Safari 4 window to a new location on the desktop.

Speed is something that all web browsers are attempting to beat each other on, and Apple said that Safari's Nitro JavaScript engine makes it up to 30 times quicker than Internet Explorer 7. During our initial tests, it certainly seemed pretty quick and on a par with Chrome. HTML 5 is also supported, making Safari 4 compatible with offline versions of internet-based applications such as Gmail.

Overall, we're impressed with Safari 4. It showcases some of Apple's more design-led features, but also manages to rival the speed of Chrome. We wouldn't recommend deployment over a corporate network until it's out of beta, though, and no date has yet been set for the final version.

First Look: Google Chrome

Daniel Robinson — 2008-09-03T15:08:00.000Z

Daniel Robinson, vnunet.com, Wednesday 3 September 2008 at 15:08:00

The new browser impresses, but not for business use

Google's Chrome is an impressive browser with a simple and clean user interface. But, while it handles popular websites with no difficulty, our tests suggest that web-based business applications may be a different matter.

Now available for download, Chrome runs on Windows XP and Windows Vista, but there is little to give away it is a beta release.

The application downloads and installs with a minimum of fuss. It has a polished look and seemed perfectly stable in our tests.

We tried out Chrome on a variety of commonly accessed websites, such as BBC News, and found it loaded pages promptly, with no surprises such as odd fonts or elements rendered out of place.

The first site we visited - vnunet.com - caused Chrome to prompt us to download a Flash plug-in, which the browser fetched and installed in seconds. However, sites with Java content proved more problematic.

Trawling through the help files, we found that Chrome works only with Java SE version 6 update 10, which is still currently in beta itself. This installed with no difficulty on our test system once we located it on Sun's download site.

Chrome passes the Acid2 browser test for standards compliance, and also achieves a higher score (76 out of 100) on the more demanding Acid3 test than either Firefox 3 or IE7 when we tried this.

We encountered some difficulties with enterprise applications. The web-based content management system we use to update vnunet.com simply stated that Chrome was an unsupported browser and would not proceed any further.

Web access to our Lotus Domino-based corporate email also did not function correctly. This suggests that business users may be best advised to stick with Internet Explorer or Firefox for now.

Google's own applications, such as Google Mail and Google Docs, displayed with no problems, as you might expect.

Most users will find Google Chrome a refreshing change from other browsers, as it has an uncluttered user interface that keeps the number of controls to a minimum.

We found it immediately obvious how everything works, while the same could not be said of Microsoft's IE7 when we first encountered it.

As with other modern browsers, Chrome supports tabs, and the company claims that each tab is an isolated 'sandbox' to prevent a page in one tab from crashing another.

We were unable to verify this, but it should mean that users will not lose any data if they are typing an email in one tab when another one fails, for example.

One neat feature is that when you open a new tab, it displays thumbnails of sites you have previously visited enabling you to select one at a glance.

Another feature that users may appreciate is incognito browsing. A similar concept to the InPrivate mode of Microsoft's IE8 beta, this opens a new browser window in which you can surf without leaving any trace in the history or cookies.

Our early verdict is that Google Chrome is easy to use and a viable alternative to other browsers for consumers.

For businesses users, however, compatibility issues with web-based applications is likely to count against it.