Chrome's outstanding features, like its download manager, incognito browsing mode and bookmark syncing, already make it a stand out app. In version 20, 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.

In addition, version 20 helps with vulnerability greatly, in that it covers patches for quite a few security-related bugs. Google Chrome's latest update will consequently help make your browsing experience 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 27.0.1453.93 in Softonic

Features

Mozilla Firefox 18 is the latest version of the popular web browser and brings with it a few key and welcome new features. First among them is the company's claim to a speedier, safer browsing experience. Tests reveal that this newest version of Mozilla Firefox is certainly quick to load even the most graphics intense pages.

Firefox 18 also now features secure connections when performing Google searches to improve privacy and there's an updated site identity indicator in the URL bar. Windows users also now get silent updates while Mac users on Lion or above can use Firefox in full-screen mode.

Mozilla Firefox's new tab layout itself is a pretty noticeable new feature. Quite similar to Google's Chrome browser, instead of seeing a blank page whenever a new tab is opened Firefox users will now be treated to icons that offer quick access to everything from bookmarks to most recently accessed and most frequently visited sites.

These icons are fully customizable in Mozilla Firefox as well. You can click and drag them to any spot you like on your name tab's page. If you're not a fan, you can also go to the grid icon on the upper right side of your browser and erase them entirely.

Something completely new to Mozilla Firefox is Facebook integration. Firefox now supports Facebook's social API so you can have dedicated buttons for Facebook in your browser. Mozilla Firefox supports Facebook's Messenger within Firefox, giving users desktop notifications as well as a persistent friends list and activity feed on the right. Conversations will open up as overlays on top of whatever website you're on so you can multitask while you chat.

Usability

Mozilla Firefox really changed the way people browse the web when it originally burst onto the scene. Today Firefox remains an incredibly powerful and customizable browser, although competition from Google Chrome has given it a definite run for its money.

Conclusion

Mozilla Firefox 20's interface isn't much different from previous versions, but the features it has added certainly make for a nicer, more enjoyable browsing experience overall.

What's new

For full release notes, please visit https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/20.0/releasenotes/

Download Mozilla Firefox 21 in Softonic

Thunderbird is Mozilla's award winning and free solution to manage your mail more efficiently. And there are many advantages of switching to it too. Unlike Mail for example, it can handle virtual identities and create on-the-fly addresses and it's widely regarded as having one of the best spam filters out there. Most recently, it's been updated with a slick tabbed interface to make managing your e-mail easier.

The fact that like Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird can be beefed up with all manner of extensions makes it an extremely competitive mail client. It's also now much faster and more stable than before due to the Gecko 5 engine.

Getting going

Setting up Mozilla Thunderbird is painless. You can quickly import your mail and contacts from your Outlook or Mail account and set up POP3, IMAP or SMTP accounts in a flash. To stay well organized, Mozilla Thunderbird offers filters to deliver your mail into separate folders and inboxes. And of course, there's a built-in spell checker to make sure that your mails are professionally crafted.

What makes Mozilla Thunderbird slightly more unusual is the fact that it comes with an integrated RSS reader. Nowadays, this is a little outdated because many people use a separate application - or even Firefox itself - to follow RSS feeds but it may be useful if you only want to mail and follow RSS feeds at the same time when composing mails.

Searching your mail

The search tool in Thunderbird is excellent and searches happen in real time as you type. Search results are displayed in a separate tab. Tabs in general are a very big part of Thunderbird and like Firefox, you can have multiple messages open in separate tabs. This is a fantastic feature of Thunderbird although does tempt you to have too many mails open at once. Archiving is also another handy feature for those that don't want to delete messages but want to clear space in their inbox.

So what about security? You might think an open-source mail client would inherently be less secure than a paid one but Thunderbird is surprisingly secure with a fairly bulletproof spam filter. The reason being is that Thunderbird is regularly updated and crafted by volunteers who's main interest is making a better product rather than profiting from an end-product. Security updates are regular but small so as not to slow-down Thunderbird.

Exchange support

One of the biggest selling points of Mozilla Thunderbird is that it offers Microsoft Exchange support, meaning it will appeal to Office users who previously discounted it.

On the downside, the app is lacking some finesse in certain areas. Thunderbird still doesn't have conversation style email views like in Gmail (although an extension to do this can be downloaded separately) and there aren't many options for managing attachments and photos. There's also no calendar but again, this can be downloaded separately in the form of "Lightning".

Overall, Thunderbird is an excellent free alternative to Microsoft Outlook.

<<

Download Mozilla Thunderbird 17.0.4 (en-US) in Softonic

SpywareBlaster takes the approach that prevention is the best way to deal with Spyware attacks and in the main, it accomplishes this aim.

Most importantly, this program is completely free, simple to setup and and very straight-forward to use. It works by preventing the installation of adware and spyware by blocking them at source. In this way, you prevent attacks rather than having to scan for installed diallers, trojans and bots later with something like Ad-Aware. Of course, this is no easy task. One annoying aspect used to be that there was no auto update function but this has thankfully been solved in this latest version. Via these updates, the program is constantly updated with a blacklist of potential threats that the program monitors for. However, you do get the slight impression that nothing much is going on when it's installed. It doesn't seem to issue any update messages or warnings although it seems to be doing it's job properly. As a result, for many people, this program may seem a bit too flimsy to trust 100% but if run alongside something like Ad-Aware as a backup tool, you don't have much to lose by trying it.

A valient effort although I still wouldn't change it for the trio of Ad-Aware, SpyBot, and Spyware Terminator.

Download SpywareBlaster 5.0 in Softonic

Firefox Beta 19 adds a built-in PDF viewer so you don't have to rely on a plug-in. The other big update is that Firefox will offer to reset the URL bar for the default search provider if a third-party program changed it.

Smaller improvements include faster startup performance so the browser should open quicker. Developers also gained new features with the debugger supporting pausing on exceptions, the remote web console being able to connect to Firefox on Android or the Firefox OS, and a browser debugger add-on.

Firefox Beta didn't add many major features, but continues the steady development of the browser.

For the stable version Firefox, click here.

Download Firefox Beta 19.0 in Softonic

As of this writing, Firefox is currently on version 1, which didn't bring many dramatic changes to the browser. Firefox 17 Aurora follows Firefox 16 with minor updates to its interface and lots of back end enhancements for developers. The biggest though, though, is that Firefox 16 prepares the browser for its web apps store that will compete with the Chrome web store.

Notable changes that users will see in Firefox 17 Aurora are a tweaked 'new tab' page. Thumbnails of the most visited sites will still be there. Mozilla added easier access to bookmarks, history, settings, add-ons, downloads, and sync preferences to the new home page.

The Awesomebar also receives a much needed update which brings instant URL completion and selects the first result automatically instead of forcing the user to press the down arrow, then enter. Previous versions of Firefox required an add-on to do this so it's nice to see Firefox 17 Aurora have it built in.

All of this is preparation for a more stable beta release of Firefox 17 Aurora, which will be released on October 9th, 2012.

Overall, Firefox 17 Aurora is a stable test release for the upcoming version of Firefox which features preparations for its upcoming web apps store.

Download Firefox 17 Aurora 17.0 a2 in Softonic

Mozilla Firefox 3.6 brought a handful of new features to this already excellent web browser.

First of all, the interface in Mozilla Firefox 3 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 in Mozilla Firefox 3 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, Mozilla Firefox 3 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 Mozilla Firefox 3 addons as I am!

Regarding efficiency and stability, the new Mozilla Firefox 3 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 Mozilla Firefox 3 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.

Mozilla Firefox 3 continues its steady development and adds interesting new features and improvements in its latest version.

Download Mozilla Firefox 3 3.6.28 in Softonic

If you're a fan of the Firefox web browser then there's a good chance that you'll like Sunbird which has been made by the same developer, Mozilla.

Unfortunately, not all of Mozilla's software is as good as Firefox but Sunbird is still a worthwhile cross-platform calendar application that's built upon Mozilla's XUL language. Note that Sunbird is still very much a work in progress and as such, even the name of the application could change soon according to Mozilla.

The interface of Mozilla Sunbird is very simple. Adding an event simply involves clicking on the 'Add Event' box in the top left-hand corner. The same goes for New Tasks. There's also a powerful search tool that finds events by keyword. Like most of Mozilla's products, it also seems very safe and allows you to set a password to access it. You can also extend Sunbird with a series of free add-ons from the Sunbird site.

On the downside, Sunbird doesn't feature integration with either iCal or Google Calendar, which you'd expect as standard really. You can, however, export the calendar. It also doesn't seem to be updated very often and looks like that Mozilla have put it on the back-burner for now.

However, if you use both Firefox and Mozilla's e-mail client Thunderbird, Sunbird is an ideal calendar component although most would probably be better sticking to Outlook's calendar.

Download Mozilla Sunbird 1.0 Beta 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

Personas for Firefox is a special extension that improves theme management for Firefox and makes it easier.

So far, applying a new theme to your favorite web browser implies searching for it on Google, downloading the correspondent file to your PC, installing it on Firefox and then restarting the browser in order to see the results. Personas makes this whole process much simpler: just install the extension and you'll see a tiny button on the lower left corner of your browser window. Then, every time you want to apply a new theme to Firefox, simply click on this button and select it from the context menu.

Personas for Firefox currently includes about fifty themes, but chances are there'll be more in the near future, especially if we take into account that this extension also makes theme designing and updating much easier. I guess we'll have to wait patiently as you can't add any new themes to the menu, but use only the ones that come shipped with the extension.

The included themes are classified into several categories (Firefox, Holidays, Nature, Scenery, Sports and others) for a more convenient browsing. Though some of them make menu bars really hard to read, many others give a nice touch of color to the browser window. Also, bear in mind that the themes only change the main window's appearance – icons and menus remain the same.

Despite the limitations of a first version, Personas for Firefox is a great extension to change your browser's appearance in just two clicks.

Download Personas Plus for Firefox 1.6.1 in Softonic

Since Firefox exploded onto the web-browsing scene in 2004, it has been downloaded an incredible 200 million times according to its developers, Mozilla. Since then, apart from some minor changes, visual teaks and security fixes, there haven’t been any radical changes – that is until now. Firefox 2.0 is finally here and brings fans a whole host of integrated functions that were previously either unavailable or needed plug-ins.

Note that many of the existing themes and extensions will not work with this beta release although you can try forcing them with the “Nightly” extension – at your own risk of course.

Amongst the security highlights of 2.0 are anti-phishing support which helps the browser discriminate between genuine websites and those intended to store and retrieve your personal information. Other goodies include enhanced tabbed browsing (each with their own close option finally), the ability to un-close tabs, search plug-in/add-on manager, and much, much more. One of the most useful features we found was a predictive search function within the Google toolbar that would suggest potential phrases and popular search terms as you typed. The automatic session retrieval option (previously available with the Tab Mix Plus plugin) is also a tonic when your system crashes or you’ve got too many tabs open and Firefox cripples under the strain.

The extension incompatibility issue is the main drawback although this will change as developers update their plugins over the coming weeks and months. The legendary memory leak also still doesn’t seem to have been fixed as Firefox continues to guzzle processing power. This resulted in frequent crashes, keyboard head-banging and violent swearing.

Whilst the recently released Internet Explorer 7 is only just introducing tabbed browsing, Firefox 2.0 is already taking internet surfing to a new level. Although many of the new features are available with plug-ins anyway, this is still a rip-roaring browser and consolidates Firefox’s position as the best browser on the market by miles.

Download Firefox 2.0.0.20 in Softonic

Just when you thought you wouldn’t see another version of Internet Explorer this side of the next ice age, Microsoft hits the world with a totally new release of its almighty browsing app.

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

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

Download Firefox 1 1.0.7 in Softonic