Windows 8 Part 2

In this part of Windows 8, we will be looking at the latest security additions and what’s new in the two most popular built-in programs, Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer.

 

Browser wars II – Features (Part 1)

This week in the browser wars series I will be testing and showing all of the most popular features used in a browser.

Before we start, if you haven’t seen the first Browser war post (Browser wars I), you can read it here: Browser wars I – Speed

Right then, let’s get started!

Here’s the browsers we’re going to be testing:

• IE10 Developer Preview (Pre-beta version)
• Firefox 8 (Stable)
• Opera 11.60 (Stable and turbo off)
• Google Chrome 16 (Stable and is virtually the same as older and newer versions – newer versions of Chrome normally include updates to support a new HTML5 element, etc. NOT speed improvements)

Features we’re going to be testing:

PART 1: Basic features

• Download manager
• Mail client (built-in to the browser)
• Favourites toolbar
• RSS feed reader (built-in to the browser)

PART 2: Advanced features

• Add-on/extension manager
• Crash recovery
• Drag/Drop
• Settings/Options  
• History

As well as see if all the browsers have them features or some of them, we’re also going to test how easy they are to use and how nice they look.

TEST 1. Download manager

The download manager is a feature that allows you to see what’s downloading, what you’ve downloaded, when you’ve downloaded something, what speed your downloading at, time till download finishes and even where you’re downloading from and to.

Test/browser	Feature	Ease of use	Appearance
IE10 Pre-beta	Included	5/5	4/5
Firefox 8	Included	5/5	4/5
Opera 11.60	Included	4/5	3.5/5
Chrome 16	Included	3.5/5	3/5

As you can see, IE10 was the best at this because it askes you what you want to do with the file before downloading it from one of 4 options: Run, Save, Save as or Cancel. After that it also does a virus scan on the file and alerts you if it has a virus before you even open the file.

This image shows a prompt for downloading Yahoo! Messenger (Click the image for a bigger version)

Firefox was also very good, scoring the same as IE10 Pre-beta and doing exactly the same thing as IE10 Pre-beta.

Opera had the most views but the way it was made to look wasn’t particularly great whilst Chrome was, well… for me personally I don’t like how it looks and it’s quite a basic manager.

TEST 2. Mail client

Test/browser	Feature
IE10 Pre-beta	With accelerator
Firefox 8	With add-on
Opera 11.60	Included
Chrome 16	With add-on

It seems that in this test, the only browser I found with an email client built-in was Opera. The rest needed and add-on for them and IE10 Pre-beta was the only one to fully miss out because, you need to get an accelerator for it (which is included if you have Hotmail) and the accelerator only let’s you email highlighted text and images and then shows it in your email client or service.

TEST 3. Favourites toolbar

Test/browser	Feature	Ease of use	Appearance
IE10 Pre-beta	Included	5/5	3/5
Firefox 8	Included	3/5	5/5
Opera 11.60	Included	3/5	4/5
Chrome 16	Included	4/5	4/5

This is simply a question if they have it or not, if it’s blended in with the browsers look and feel, and how easy it is to add a favourite/bookmark to the toolbar.

IE10’s favourites toolbar didn’t seem to blend in nicely with the rest of the browser, whilst Firefox and Chrome seemed to have made the toolbar look more blended in with the browser’s UI. 

 

TEST 4. RSS feed reader

Test/browser	Feature
IE10 Pre-beta	Included
Firefox 8	Included
Opera 11.60	Included
Chrome 16	With add-on

RSS feeds are basically like newspapers that update them-self’s with the latest news. Loads of sites have RSS on them, this site is one of them!

It’s quite interesting how every browser that included the feature displayed it differently… (Click the images for bigger size)