The Internet….. these are the voyagers of the Internet, their continuing mission: to bring all sorts of information as quickly as possible to your desktop! Yes I’m of course talking about the Web Browser. In the past there were only one or two different browsers that most people used. However today there are many including: Firefox, Opera, Google Chrome, Safari and Internet Explorer. The first three of these have recently released new test versions of their software and as these three are the only cross platform browsers in the list above (I.E. they work on Windows, Mac and Linux) then these will be discussed in this article.

Google Chrome

The version of Chrome for Linux is an extremely early Alpha version therefore there are many features that are not available to use yet. The best thing about this version however is the speed, it is a really good example of how Google Chrome will work on Linux and how fast it will really be. The speed is incredible when compared to current browsers such as Firefox 3.

Opera 10

Opera is a browser that for me was always one step behind the competition, saying that though some of the underthehood features such as support for the upcoming HTML 5 but been built in for a while I read. This new version of Opera really is at the forefront of the new browsers. Again speed is the big thing with this release. It comes with a Turbo mode which is billed to make even a dialup connection feel like Broadband. I decided to enable this turbo mode on my broadband connection and was amazed at the speed of pages. Opera with this feature enabled is hands down the fastest browser out of all the new crop. However this speed in turbo mode comes at a price. In order to get this speed, Opera rendered most pictures at a lower resolution so websites may not look as their author intended. Still if speed is needed or you’re using a 3G dongle then this is a godsend!

Firefox 3.5

Was the last for to test on my Ubuntu box as I expected the installtion to be too difficult. I’m not a fan of building programs from source which used to be needed not so long ago if you wanted to test out beta versions. Luckily Canonical, the funding behind Ubuntu started a feature called Personal Package Archives (PPAs). These PPAs allow packages to built easier and then installed through a repository in a packages manager. I found that there were packages for Firefox 3.5 already in Ubuntu and it was a breeze to install them. For the latest package I installed the Mozilla PPA.

Again the first thing that is noticable in Firefox 3.5 is the speed. In my test browsing it just displayed everything so quickly compared to Firefox 3. And with all the Addons that the Firefox universe has to offer coupled with new features such as Private Browsing mode Firefox 3.5 is shaping up to be the best yet.

Conclusion
So in conclusion, the future of the Internet is indeed bright! With so much speed to choose from, the browser wars are really hotting up and threaten to leave Safari and IE on the side lines. Although Chrome and Opera are looking and feeling good I think I will stay with Firefox 3.5. I just cannot live without my addons!

Do you agree with me? Let us know in the comments.