Visual tour: See what you're missing in the latest crop of best of breed browsers

Here's a close-up look at how Firefox 2, Internet Explorer 7, Opera 9 and Safari 2 handle key browsing features and functions.

Toolbars and Customization

Internet Explorer 7 features a brand-new stripped-back interface with missing menus and toolbar buttons in unexpected places -- and for the most part, you can't customize it. Firefox and Safari take the middle ground, letting you rearrange items in your toolbars or save multiple bookmarks and folders to the bookmarks bar. (Of course, Firefox' interface can be further tweaked with its vast library of third-party add-ons.) At the far end of the customization scale, Opera builds in half a dozen optional toolbars and endless configuration options.

Tabbed Browsing

Not too long ago, opening multiple Web pages in different tabs within the same browser window was the killer feature for Web browsers. These days tabbed browsing is standard, but each browser has different ways of helping you finding your way when you've got lots of tabs open.
Safari 2 offers a bare-bones approach to working with multiple tabs: Mouse over a tab to see a text tip pop up with the site's name.

Opera 9 provides more complete site information along with a helpful thumbnail image when you hover over a tab.

Firefox 2 has a handy drop-down list that shows all your open tabs. (Click the down arrow at the right edge of the tabs bar.) This shot also shows the third-party Colorful Tabs extension in use -- each tab gets a different color to make them stand out from one another.

IE7 can show thumbnails of all your open tabs with a click of the Quick Tabs button at the left edge of the tabs area.

Session Restore

What happens when you're in the middle of a big research project with 20 tabs open, but before you can save everything your browser crashes? That's where the session restore feature comes in -- in the event of an unexpected shutdown, it remembers what tabs you had open and lets you pick up right where you left off. But only two of the browsers in our roundup include this incredibly useful feature.

Search

The built-in search boxes in Firefox, IE, and Opera all look and feel similar, offering several default search engines to choose from and making it fairly easy to add even more. Safari takes a different approach, offering only Google search and using the drop-down menu to show recent searches.

RSS Feeds

All four browsers in our roundup include some level of support for RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, a way to subscribe to your favorite Web sites and blogs. Once you've subscribed to an RSS feed, all the latest news and updates to that site will be delivered to you automatically.

Safari lets you click the RSS button at the right edge of the address bar to see an attractive, easily readable version of that site's feed in the browser window.

With IE7, you can read RSS feeds right in the browser window, and you can organize your feeds just as you would Favorites.

Like Safari and IE, Firefox can show feeds in the browser window, though it's not rendered as attractively as their versions. You can also subscribe to feeds using a standalone RSS application or a Web-based service such as Bloglines.

Instead of looking like a Web page in the browser window, RSS feeds in Opera mimic the look of e-mail or a newsreader. Clicking an article in the list makes it appear in a separate pane below.

Regards,
Kumar Thirumal.