Chrome's outstanding features, like its download manager, incognito browsing mode and bookmark syncing, already make it a stand out app. In version 17, it adds a more new features, as well some tweaks that make it even more user-friendly.

New features

Being able to search directly from the address bar is one of the great things about Google Chrome. Now Omnibox, Google Chrome's address bar, will offer you various suggestions as you type. Depending on how accurate it thinks its results are, Chrome may even begin to pre-load a chosen page. Popular sites like Facebook and Twitter are now sure to load almost instantaneously.

You'll now also receive warnings when Google Chrome thinks a downloading file that might contain malware or something harmful to your PC. It does this by tracing the download's originating server and comparing it to sites on its blacklist. If you're concerned about privacy when it comes to Google looking at your downloads for potential malware, you can disable this feature within your browser preferences.

Updates and tweaks

Google Chrome introduces several smaller updates designed to improve the user experience. First, Google Chrome has improved page zooming to make it more consistent with other browsers - you can now zoom up to 500%. In addition, Print Preview no longer shows up in its own tab but rather appears in a highly-configurable modal window - this improves your workflow and makes printing even quicker. Google Chrome's History tab has also undergone a redesign. It now allows users to filter out or even remove specific domains you don't want showing up there.

There's also been an update to the V8 JavaScript engine and more than a dozen security fixes. In short, these changes make browsing even quicker - and using the internet even safer.

Chrome extensions

Last, but not least, there are also changes for extensions - not only can you now count on a range of Google Chrome extensions that rivals (and in many cases betters) Firefox's, but those of you with a more technical bent can take advantage of improved extension APIs, so if you've got an idea, it's even easier to make it into an extension yourself.

If you're considering making the switch from old favorites like Firefox or Internet Explorer, we'd wholeheartedly recommend Google Chrome as the browser of the future!

Google Chrome, Google's browser, mixes a clean, minimalist interface with a variety of powerful tools, making it a great browser.

Download Google Chrome 19.0.1084.46 in Softonic

With good reason too. Firefox remains an incredibly powerful and customizable browser although persistent memory leakage problems and competition from Google Chrome have dented its popularity.

Mozilla Firefox 12, though not very different from Firefox 11 in terms of design, brings a bunch of subtle improvements. There are several changes in Firefox 12, but mainly related to developer features. Mozilla claim there are 85 changes in all but the most notable is that Windows users will no longer get pestered by a User Account Control pop-up every time the browser updates. Also, the HTML5 media controls have been updated to provide a full screen button.

The developer console changes include improvement to Web Console, Style Editor, Page Inspector, Style Inspector, and HTML View, as well as the recently introduced Scratchpad and Page Inspector 3D View.

The interface is pretty much the same as Firefox 11, with a minimalist toolbar and there's still no way of removing elements that you may not want such as Java and .Net Framework. The major downside for most users however is that some plug-ins or add-ons won't work with Firefox 12 yet - so if you have a lot installed, prepare to be disappointed.

One major problem that persists is the high usage of RAM when Firefox is displaying Flash videos such as YouTube. Firefox runs an extra "Plugin-container" process for Flash videos that can occasionally consume 100% of your CPU and cause your machine to freeze.

Firefox 12 isn't a revolution in the development of Firefox, but there are some useful improvements that still make it one of the best browsers out there.

Download Mozilla Firefox 12.0 in Softonic

The first thing you'll notice about Internet Explorer 9 is an overhauled interface. Making the most of the transparent graphical style available in Windows 7 and newer editions of Windows Vista, IE 9 looks sleek, smart and simpler than ever before. Like in Google Chrome, the Address bar and Search box have been merged to create a simpler, more seamless user experience.

Among the new features included in Internet Explorer 9 are better integration with the Windows operating system and a seriously beefed-up security system. IE 9 also lets you 'pin' websites to the Superbar and allows you to bookmark your favorite websites as 'applications' in your OS. As for safety, the new Tracking protection and ActiveX filtering features let you block certain sites from tracking your movements online and switch off ActiveX elements on a per-site basis, respectively. The new Performance Advisor add-on identifies add-ons that are slowing Internet Explorer down (a feature badly needed in Mozilla Firefox).

Internet Explorer 9 also offers improved speed and performance, as well as better compliance with web standards and new technologies. IE 9 features decent support for HTML 5 (the new generation of media-rich websites use this language), and now finishes the Acid 3 test with a near-perfect 95/100. New features like hang recovery and InPrivate Filtering provide Internet Explorer a stabler and more secure web experience than most other browsers.

In all, the latest version of Windows Internet Explorer 9 is faster and prettier than its predecessors - and really throws down the gauntlet to its competitors. Watch out: the browser wars just got exciting again.

Download Internet Explorer 9.0.8112.16421 Windows 7 32-bit in Softonic

First of all, the interface in Firefox 3.6 is now much easier to customize. This version offers seamless integration with Personas, Mozilla's theme gallery for Firefox, which lets you apply new Firefox themes to your browser with a single mouse click. What's more, you can try them on the browser before actually applying them, just by hovering your mouse over the theme's name.

Another impressive new feature is the native support for watching videos in full screen – as long as they've got the HTML5 'video' tag. Simply right click on the video and select the "Full screen" mode to turn the browser into a media player. Also, Firefox has released a new online service called Plugin Check, which helps you check for new updates for your plugins – quite handy, especially if you're as addicted to Firefox addons as I am!

Regarding efficiency and stability, Mozilla states that the new Firefox 3.6 includes the latest version of the Gecko engine and has improved Java performance. These two elements are meant to provide a faster web browsing – which has been its weakest point of late. While I haven't tested the final version long enough, I have to say I've been using the betas and release candidates for a while, and I'm quite happy with the program's response.

In all, the new features included in the latest version of Mozilla Firefox may not be as many or as spectacular as other releases, but they do provide a better user experience in terms of usability, customization and performance.

Firefox continues its steady development and adds interesting new features and improvements in its latest version.

Download Firefox 3 3.6.23 in Softonic

Overview

Opera 11.52 keeps the general design and functionality of the highly-praised Opera 11.10, but adds convenient improved features like an improved Speed Dial, Password Syncing across devices and a faster rendering engine. As for the the interface, Opera 11.52 features a slightly cleaner GUI with a focus on webpages instead of buttons and menus. Overall, Opera 11.52 isn't a huge change compared to the last version, but it has been improved with some nice new features.

Innovations and speed

The big innovation in the last version of Opera was extensions and while the choice of browser enhancements is still fairly limited, when you install or uninstall add-ons, you don't have to restart your browser like you do with Firefox. Opera 11.52 runs just as quickly as Google Chrome (the developer claims it's even faster) and the rendering engine has been tweaked slightly to offer an even faster browsing experience.

The forward-thinking Unite is still here, allowing you to share your stuff directly with friends and more. Visual Tabs and Tab Stacking is useful if you often have too many open, and there are now visual mouse gestures. These are well implemented, and accessed by holding the right mouse button which brings up a translucent guide to mouse gestures. This is a great introduction for people who've never used gestures, and hopefully allows for greater use in the future.

There's still an integrated mail client, which continues Opera 11's move towards doing everything you need in one application. The newest features or improvements of note in 11.52 are Speed Dial and Password Syncing. The most notable improvement has been to Speed Dial which instead of simply giving easy access to your favorite sites, now allows you to embed your Speed Dial with dynamic information - in other words, web apps within Opera. Meanwhile Password Syncing allows you to sync passwords across machines and devices - just sign-up for an account and Opera does the rest. There have also been some HTML5 improvements for developers such as Session History, Navigation and the W3C File API.

Conclusions

Opera 11.52 is a definite improvement on Opera 11.10 although the changes aren't revolutionary. However, if you're looking for a new browser, this is probably the most innovative currently on the market and is well worth installing.

Download Opera 11.64 in Softonic

The interface of Internet Explorer 8 hasn't changed that much compared to older versions, except for one small detail; the menu bar is back and shows up by default again. Besides that, everything else is in place: the address bar is again on top of the interface, and Favorites are accessible via a drop-down menu.

As for new features, Internet Explorer 8 includes two main new tools: one is Accelerators (previously known as Activities), and the other is Web Slices. The first one gives you direct access to various online services just by right-clicking anywhere on the web page or on highlighted text. For instance, you can look up a word, map an address or perform a search with those marked words. The main drawback is that all these options use Microsoft's Windows Live services which means that you're stuck with them.

Regarding Internet Explorer's Web Slices, these are a kind of RSS-style tool that tracks changes and updates to selected websites and keeps you informed about them. It comes in really handy for tracking small changes that can't be followed by RSS, without having to visit the site: online auction bids, stock exchange values, weather information and more.

Besides these two tools, Internet Explorer 8 also includes many interesting new features. One of them, the 'Suggested sites' function, recommends new websites you may not know about, based on your browsing history.

Another nice feature is InPrivate Browsing, Internet Explorer's version of the popular Chrome Incognito mode. While InPrivate Browsing is on, the browser won't save data, including cookies, history and temporary Internet files. As for security, Internet Explorer 8 includes the so-called SmartScreen filter, which prevents you from entering fraudulent websites and protects you from online phishing scams.

Internet Explorer 8 is truly a giant step forward, and proves that Microsoft is working hard to offer a more secure, compatible and customizable browser.

Download Internet Explorer 8 in Softonic

The first thing you'll notice about Internet Explorer 9 is an overhauled interface. Making the most of the transparent graphical style available in Windows 7 and newer editions of Windows Vista, IE 9 looks sleek, smart and simpler than ever before. Like in Google Chrome, the Address bar and Search box have been merged to create a simpler, more seamless user experience.

Among the new features included in Internet Explorer 9 are better integration with the Windows operating system and a seriously beefed-up security system. IE 9 also lets you 'pin' websites to the Superbar and allows you to bookmark your favorite websites as 'applications' in your OS. The new Performance Advisor add-on identifies add-ons that are slowing Internet Explorer down (a feature badly needed in Mozilla Firefox).

Internet Explorer 9 also offers improved speed and performance, as well as better compliance with web standards and new technologies. IE 9 features decent support for HTML 5 (the new generation of media-rich websites use this language), and now finishes the Acid 3 test with a near-perfect 95/100. New features like hang recovery and InPrivate Filtering provide Internet Explorer a stabler and more secure web experience than most other browsers.

In all, the latest version of Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 is faster and prettier than its predecessors - and really throws down the gauntlet to its competitors. Watch out: the browser wars just got exciting again.

Download Internet Explorer 9.0.8112.16421 Windows 7 64-bit in Softonic

Compared to the latest stable version this edition contains subtle modifications that make it worth trying for die-hard Chrome fans. As you expect from Google Chrome, you get a web browser with a sleek, minimalist design.

Even compared with Safari and especially Firefox, the browser has very few buttons. All settings and options to choose your extensions are accessible via icons in the top right.

Please note that this version of Google Chrome is strictly a developer release, so bear in mind that you may occasionally encounter bugs and the developers are very keen to hear feedback on such problems.

The latest developer version of Google Chrome gives you a taste of what's to come from one of the fastest growing browsers out there.

Download Google Chrome Dev 19.0.1084.15 in Softonic

See the future of IE

This preview only works in Windows 7, and is essentially just a window that will display web pages. To navigate to a page, press Ctrl + O and enter the URL you want. It's hardly user friendly, but it's not supposed to be. Internet Explorer 10 Platform Preview is meant for web developers and anyone interested in testing and debugging the technology.

HTML 5

You can view various test sites with Internet Explorer 10 Platform Preview, especially designed to show off IE 10's HTML 5 performance, like the all new Fish Bowl site. If you want the most up-to-date version of IE, you can download Internet Explorer here.

Internet Explorer 10 Platform Preview shows off the early development of Microsoft's popular browser.

Download Internet Explorer 10 Platform Preview 2.10.1000.16394 in Softonic

Things have changed a lot since then however and Safari 5 sees some exciting introductions such as a new Reader icon for easier reading in one page, faster page load times and vastly improved HTML5 support. All of the previous features such as tabs on top for easier page management and Cover Flow to flip through your bookmarked sites iTunes style have been retained too.

If you're new to Safari, the first thing you'll notice is how clean it feels compared to many other browsers. There are no annoying toolbars or plugins installed and the result of this is that Safari looks trim and loads pages very quickly. The other benefit is that maximum space is given to the contents of your page rather than a chunky browser.

In the previous version of Safari, Apple introduced Top Sites which is one of the most impressive aspects of Safari. It shows a panoramic thumbnail view of your most visited sites in one screen. Just click on the window you want to visit that site. This certainly looks cool, although its day-to-day usefulness is questionable. It is a good way of tracking which sites you visit most frequently though and you can lock your favorite sites to one single position so that you'll always know where it is when you open Safari. Sites with a star in the corner denote those with new content.

Meanwhile Cover Flow lets you browse through your bookmarks presenting full page views of the sites as they looked the last time you browsed them. The principle is based on flipping through albums in iTunes. Again, this looks cool although usually, I don't really care what the site looked like the last time I visited it - I just want to get there as quickly as possible. What I do like is the History Search - just type a word and Safari throws up every single page it has cached with that word on - very useful when you can't remember where the hell you saw the name of that person or game.

Other handy features in Safari include Tabs on Top which makes it a little easier to access and open your tabs at the very top of Safari. You can even drag and drop tabs into another Safari window. Speed has always been of the essence in Safari and Apple have stepped up the pace with an enhanced Nitro engine which it claims executes Javascript 25% faster than the last version. It's certainly damn quick and I'm mighty impressed at how fast it's loading my favorite sites such as YouTube and the BBC (and Softonic of course!).

In this latest version, the most notable feature is the new Reader which allows you to view all of your content on one page although there is no way to change the font. There's also a new Bing search option for Safari's search field, in addition to Google and Yahoo! HTML5 support has been improved meaning you can now view HTML5 video in full screen plus HTML5 Geolocation features are now available to Safari users. Navigating in Safari has also been made much easier due to a more predictive URL bar which actually searches cached webpages for keywords and archiving of exactly when you viewed certain pages is more precise and refined.

In addition to these changes, all the standard features in Safari remain. By clicking on the RSS tag in the URL bar, you can get a view of all the posts in a feed, which you can present chronologically and get a detailed or a title view. There will be inevitably some programs and plugins - such as 1Password - that don't work with this new version of Safari but these issues will quickly be ironed out by the developers of respective software.

I love the look and speed of Safari but the lack of plugins available compared to Firefox and general instability issues mean that it's still going to be a while before Apple can lure me over to their browser.

Download Safari 5.1.5 in Softonic

It’s been so long in the making that many web users have got fed up with waiting for Microsoft to update its technology and have looked elsewhere – mainly in the direction of Firefox.

Now the big, bad king of the browser world is in no mood to see its crown wrestled away, but can it do enough to win back its deserters?

Microsoft has basically stripped back the menu bar and hidden all of the tools and functions within a set of compact icons, placed subtly at the top-right of the interface.

It allows you to see pages in a very large viewing space. IE has also finally decided to support tabbed browsing. It includes a ‘New tab’ button for instant opening, plus an ingenious ‘Quick Tabs’ button, which opens up thumbnail previews of all your opened tabs in one screen and, unlike Firefox, IE 7 actually has a close button on each tab.

You can even save groups of tabs as your homepage so they all launch upon start-up. We also appreciated the print preview tool, which adjusts the page according to your paper size.

Click on it and you will be lead to a page that reveals all the feeds for that website. Just click on the “subscribe to this feed” link to add it to your favourites.

You can also subscribe by clicking on the small star icon on the left. Unlike Firefox however, there’s no drop down view of each item in a feed.

The Favorites Center, opened up by clicking on the big star icon, is divided into favourites, feeds and history.

Apart from a pop-up blocker, version 7 also dishes out an anti-phishing filter. To give it a try, we opened up known phishing sites published on Phishtank. To our disappointment, the filter failed to report most of them. Phishing protection may not be IE 7’s strength but at least the browser incorporates security protocols SSL 2.

0 and 3. 0 and TLS 1. 0, just like Firefox.

We found IE to lag and drag whenever opening up new tabs, the tools section and applying new settings. You can add a good number of search bar providers and add-ons from the Microsoft website, however they are still in much fewer number compared to the Mozilla extensions for Firefox.

Furthermore, IE 7 is actually limited to those of you that have XP SP2 and for some reason you will need to disable your antivirus and restart your PC to properly install it.

Download Internet Explorer 7 in Softonic

Built on the open source Chromium project, RockMelt is unusual for a browser in that you have to log in to use it properly. It looks like Google Chrome with two slim sidebars. On the left is a Facebook bar with all your online friends, and on the right a notifications bar, that houses pop-ups for your Facebook wall, Twitter feed plus any RSS feeds you want. You cannot add email at the moment.

Clicking the Facebook or Twitter button opens a neat window for the appropriate feed. You can disconnect these window, and float them anywhere on your desktop. The same is true of chats on the left sidebar. Next to the address bar RockMelt has a Share button, allowing you to quickly post interesting links to Facebook or Twitter.

If you're a heavy Twitter and Facebook user, RockMelt will really suit you. It's fast, very well thought-out and the social integration is better than anything else available. It may be in Beta, but RockMelt looks and feels like a finished product already.

RockMelt is a genuinely excellent social browser, building on the already great Chrome to make a uniquely attractive and useful application. Essential.

Download RockMelt 0.9.62.313 in Softonic

Flock used to be based on Firefox 3, but the move to Chrome has meant improved speed, along with the clean minimalism that defines Google's open source browser.

Flock has now pared down the social integration to three services, which makes it more focused. The social bar on the right of Flock shows updates from Twitter and Facebook. It can be closed at the touch of a button, and you can update your statuses from both the sidebar and a button next to the address bar.

If you use Facebook and Twitter a lot, being able to update and respond to tweets and wall posts without opening a new browser tab is useful. Click on a tweet, and a neat bubble pops up where you can reply, retweet or direct message the user.

Facebook posts are treated in the the same way. While Flock is functional, it's not perfect. The sidebar is bulky, meaning you won't want to keep it open while you're browsing. Flock also fails to integrate other Facebook features like Chat. You can add RSS feeds too, but this can make the feed bar extremely busy!

Firefox fans may mourn the move to Chrome, but it has made Flock a cleaner, more efficient social browser. However, it's not quite got the integration perfected yet.

Download Flock 3.5.0.4641 in Softonic

This Windows-based emulator gives you a sneak peak at how Firefox Mobile will perform. And by the look of things, it's shaping up pretty well. Instantly, you'll see that this isn't merely a port of the desktop version of Firefox but rather a completely new interface designed to be used comfortably on small screens.

Touch-screen users will love the way that Firefox Mobile is organized. The main window dedicates pretty much the whole screen space to the web page itself rather than placing loads of tools and options on screen. In fact, the only things displayed here other than the web page itself are the large, touch-friendly address bar and bookmarks button.

Firefox Mobile avoids clutter by locking its settings in a menu that can only be viewed by dragging the screen to the right. Here, you can tinker with options for JavaScript, cookies, passwords, etc., as well as managing your plug-ins. Yes, that's right, Firefox Mobile will be fully extensible, and this version even picks up the add-ons you've got installed in your desktop version of the browser.

Perhaps the feature I like most in Firefox Mobile, is the way it handles tabs. Instead of displaying tabs underneath the address bar like in normal Firefox, this version stores all your tabs in a hidden area on the left, which again, can be opened by dragging your finger across the screen - this time to the left. This is another way in which the program optimizes screen space without sacrificing functionality.

There are other features on the horizon that haven't been wholly integrated into the Fennec alpha yet, such as quick dial for phone numbers on Web pages, and more work will be done to support maps and GPS tools. In fact, the sky is the limit really in terms of features if enough developers get excited about Firefox Mobile. Mozilla is banking on the fact that developers can build apps and add-ons freely using AJAX, CSS, JavaScript or HTML, rather than having to learn new techniques to code projects for multiple mobile platforms using multiple languages.

For now though, Fennec is a very crude version of Firefox Mobile, which is rife with display errors, bugs and feels very much incomplete.

Nevertheless, if you want a sneaky peak at how the future of mobile Web browsing might look, then the Firefox Mobile emulator is worth a look.

Download Firefox Mobile Fennec 1.0 Alpha 2 in Softonic

We'll leave this one up for a while in case advanced users would like to download it for other purposes!

Download Firefox 1.0.7 in Softonic

While keeping the same minimalist design and features (new tab page, download manager, incognito window and more) of the stable version, Google Chrome (Beta) provides you with the possibility to try out the latest tools before they're implemented in the stable version.

Of course, you should bear in mind that using a beta version means you may find the odd bug and have stability issues, but for the most adventurous users this is a small price to pay for being the first to try out new Google Chrome (Beta) features – and provide Google with early feedback about them.

If you feel like walking on the wild side, give Google Chrome (Beta) a try and you'll be able to test new features before anybody else.

Download Google Chrome (Beta) 18.0.1025.142 in Softonic

If you're a fan of the 4th installment in Rockstar's epic GTA series, you're probably going to want a tast of it where you can get it. This is a fan-designed theme, so don't expect multi-million dollar graphics, but GTA4 Theme is still a great option - a shadowy figure stands by his car trunk down by the dock, bathed in the brilliant light of a vibrant sunset.

The only problem with GTA4 Theme, though, is that the lovely yellow glow makes it difficult to read certain tab headings. Seeing as how it's free and really simple to install however, just installing it and taking a look will be enough to tell if GTA4 Theme is for you.

If you can see your tabs, GTA4 Theme is a great fan-designed theme for Chrome.

Download GTA4 Theme for Google Chrome 1.1 in Softonic

The first thing you'll notice about Internet Explorer 9 is an overhauled interface. Making the most of the transparent graphical style available in Windows 7 and newer editions of Windows Vista, IE 9 looks sleek, smart and simpler than ever before. Like in Google Chrome, the Address bar and Search box have been merged to create a simpler, more seamless user experience.

Among the new features included in Internet Explorer 9 are better integration with the Windows operating system and a seriously beefed-up security system. IE 9 also lets you 'pin' websites to the Superbar and allows you to bookmark your favorite websites as 'applications' in your OS. The new Performance Advisor add-on identifies add-ons that are slowing Internet Explorer down (a feature badly needed in Mozilla Firefox).

Internet Explorer 9 also offers improved speed and performance, as well as better compliance with web standards and new technologies. IE 9 features decent support for HTML 5 (the new generation of media-rich websites use this language), and now finishes the Acid 3 test with a near-perfect 95/100. New features like hang recovery and InPrivate Filtering provide Internet Explorer a stabler and more secure web experience than most other browsers.

In all, the latest version of Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 is faster and prettier than its predecessors - and really throws down the gauntlet to its competitors. Watch out: the browser wars just got exciting again.

Download Internet Explorer 9.0.8112.16421 Windows Vista 32-bit in Softonic

This web browser is based on the Gecko engine (the same one used by Firefox) and offers you a new interface to browse the web from. The actual appearance of CometBird is not that different from other web browsers – especially Firefox – but it does include some outstanding features.

One of them is the ability to synchronize your bookmarks with an online bookmark syncing service provided by the CometBird developers, known as CometMarks. Another one is the possibility to download media files (Flash, video and audio files) directly from the browser, without using third-party download managers. It's a pity it doesn't work with photos as well.

CometBird worked fine during our tests and was very light on resources, which is always good. But I had the impression that it wasn't that much different to other web browsers. Besides, the translation tool didn't work and when it comes to importing data from other browsers (bookmarks, history, passwords and the likes) it only works with Internet Explorer.

CometBird is a fairly standard web browser that joins the list of available choices, but doesn't really stand out with any special features.

Download CometBird 3.6.16 in Softonic

Note that Firefox 13 is strictly a beta release meaning no guarantees can be made about stability or functionality or compatibility with add-ons. If you don't want to risk having problems, download the stable version of Firefox.

There are several minor appearance changes in Firefox 13. There's a new Home Page (type "about:home" into the URL) and a new Tabs Page. The Home Page provides customized access to bookmarks, downloads, add-ons etc. Mozilla say it will eventually be used for access to the Mozilla Apps Market. The new Tabs Page is similar to Chrome and Opera in that it gives thumbnail previews of open pages.

The interface is pretty much the same as Firefox 12, with a minimalist toolbar and there's still no way of removing elements that you may not want such as Java and .Net Framework. The major downside for most users however is that some plug-ins or add-ons won't work with Firefox 13 yet - so if you have a lot installed, prepare to be disappointed.

Firefox 13 Beta has some useful enhancements for fans of the browser.

Download Firefox (Beta) 13 in Softonic