The most notable of these-"phishing protection"-is supposed to guard users from logging on to known sites that trick Web surfers into giving away sensitive personal information. Microsoft and Mozilla are both trumpeting improved security features. When you click those little orange RSS links on a site, you get options for dealing with the feeds you can send them to a dedicated reader or put them in Firefox's Live Bookmarks-an updatable listing of headlines that lives in your Bookmarks menu. Also, managing RSS feeds is easier and more efficient. ![]() Tabbed browsing is enhanced with convenient little close buttons (à la Safari) on all the tabs and a "Recently Closed Tabs" item in the History menu. But there's some extra shine on a few of the features that have already taken this browser from outsider status to capturing what is believed to be 12 to 15 percent of the browser market in just two years. It was already a pretty great browser, so not much work was needed. You can add any search provider you want to the toolbar.įirefox 2.0 looks like a crisper, more polished version of its streamlined, functional old self. Just hit Ctl + Q and the screen image bursts into an array of clickable thumbnails of all pages in your tabs-a kind of scaled-down version of Apple's "Exposé." The browser's search engine management is a real timesaver. IE 7 not only adds tabbed browsing but offers a new twist on this function: Quick Tabs. Still, the browser seems visually cleaner overall, with more screen space. The functionality is there, but the new interface is a bit bewildering at first. You'll also notice that IE's familiar menus-"File," "Edit," "View" and so on-are gone (hit the Alt key if you really want 'em back). And many of the upgrades, including tabbed browsing and an integrated RSS reader, are already familiar to Firefox users. No surprise-it desperately needed a new look (IE 6 appeared in 2001). Of the two, IE 7 is the most changed from the previous version. One of the browser upgrades represents a vast improvement over its predecessor, while the other is a freshening of an already top-notch, innovative product. I downloaded both and ran through some of the new and improved features on a Windows-based computer. There's no need to draw a line in the virtual sand and choose. The two programs are free, you can use one or the other-or both-and you can get them whenever you want. The web browser war between Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 (released last week) and Mozilla's Firefox 2.0 (officially released yesterday) shouldn't really be much of a fight as far as their users are concerned.
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