I recently upgraded my machine from XP to Windows 7 and in doing so did a full format. To celebrate a clean slate, I decided I would finally give Google Chrome 2.0 a shot and use it for the first two weeks to see if I liked it better than Firefox 3.5. Here are my findings: Speed: This was my main reason for wanting to switch. I'd heard about Chromes amazing start up speed, and it didn't disappoint. In my personal testing on an AMD Phenom 9750 2.4 Ghz quad core with 4 GB of RAM, Chrome started about twice as fast as Firefox and loaded pages at about the same rate. While this is only a few seconds shaved off total browsing time, Chrome does feel quite zippy in everything it does. Adrian Kingsley Hughes from ZDNet has benchmarked Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3.5 and 3.0, Safari 4, Opera 10 (alpha!) and Chrome 2.0 browsers using SunSpider, V8 benchmarks. These are her findings. I will say this: Chrome needs some major work in rendering flash files. It is slow, and lags. This might be Adobe's fault, and hopefully they can get their game together. In the end, this category still goes hands ...

It's official. Mozilla has finally released the final version of Firefox 3.5. Head on over to Firefox.com to download the 8 MB file. Some of the new features include: Speed! The browser will have a new JavaScript engine for faster Web applications such as Google Docs, and was built from the ground up to make browsing faster. According to Mozilla, "Firefox 3.5 is more than twice as fast as Firefox 3, and ten times as fast as Firefox 2". Private browsing mode. IE and Safari have had this feature for several months now, so it's good to hear Mozilla finally jumped on the bandwagon. While most people will joke that this is only for raging porn-addicts, this feature is actually quite useful for people surfing on public computers or who need to hide certain things from prying eyes like medical conditions. The ability to watch video built into Web pages without plug-ins. Good for the noobs out there who don't know how to get said plug-ins. Fancy downloadable fonts! This should make browsing more enjoyable and customizable. It will also fix Firefox's famous printing problems. Geolocation technology that can let Web sites know where you are. For a list of all the new features, click here. To see ...

Our friends over at mashable.com hae put together a nice graph which shows the slow, creeping demise of our favorite internet browser, Internet Explorer. We can see in 2005, IE had a commanding 90% market share. In 2006 Firefox 2.0 was released and it's been downhill ever since. Firefox 3.0 did even more damage, and Mozilla has a quarter of the market share now. With other competitors like Safari and Chrome now getting serious looks by consumers, I think we can all rejoice in the competition Microsoft is getting. Is it any wonder they're losing users in droves? A study found that IE uses about 80 MB or RAM while Firefox and Chrome were in the mid-30's. With a speedier loading time and the benefit of extensions, we can hope IE will adapt or die a painful death.

If you haven't yet made the jump to firefox, GO DOWNLOAD IT! Try it for a week, and you'll be converted. The install file is only 7.1 megabytes. It has an extremely small system footprint, which uses much less RAM than IE. By comparison, Internet Explorer 8 is around a 60 MB download. One of my favorite features of Firefox is the ability to add plugins (small addons which perform specific functions like viewing special graphic formats or playing multimedia files). Here is a quick list of some of plugins I find most useful. Greasemonkey - "Allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript." This addon really deserves its own category. With Greasemonkey you add your whatever funcionality you want through scripts downloaded from their site. You can change the way Gmail looks, remove ads from Facebook and Youtube, or you can download apple movie trailers with a link placed next to the movie. Whatever you want to do, there is probably a script to do it. You can search the different scripts at their website. Adblock Plus - Ever been annoyed by all those ads and banners on the internet that often take longer to ...

I guess you've got to start somewhere. Firefox can now claim a major victory in the browser wars - they have 100% market share on the entire continent of Antarctica. Seems the scientists down there are keen on speed and reliability. I don't blame them.