Free Browsers

Avant Browser

        The Avant browser is sufficiently fast, preloaded with two dozen similar skins as well as tabbed browsing and modular tool bars that let you move around and hide the Status bar, Toolbar, Search window, and navigation controls. The Menu bar, though, is counter intuitively pinned to the upper-right corner, and icons for proprietary functions, such as an in-page search term highlighting toggle, aren't instantly comprehensible.
        Avant can save personalized data online, making bookmarks and form content accessible from any machine. Around the same size as Firefox, Avant includes many features that are available to Firefox users only through plug-ins--such as automatic form fillers. The Full Screen view auto hides all menu bars, a nice touch, but certain plug-ins--notably Flash--didn't work on Windows Vista.
        Avant is a good browser with some nice built-in features and interface-customization options, but the lack of extensibility and Vista problems don't help. We recommend it to users who want a Microsoft-based engine but think that Internet Explorer 7 is a pain.
Download Avant Browser

Google Chrome Browser

          Chrome is Google's attempt to make the Web browser disappear and to focus on the applications and pages users are viewing, rather than on the border with its tools. Some of Chrome's basic underpinnings are quite novel, but people will recognize other features as they exist in other, open-source Web browsers on the market today.
           Chrome is amazingly fast and is easily the quickest browser available. Based on Web kit, the same open-source engine that powers Apple Safari, Google's Android mobile platform, and several other Web-browsing tools, Chrome's interface is a drastic departure from other browsers.
           Instead of the traditional toolbar, Chrome puts its tabs on top. Moreover, the tabs are detachable: "tabs" and "windows" are interchangeable here. Detached tabs can be dragged and dropped into the browser, and tabs can be rearranged at any time. By isolating each tab's processes, when one site crashes, the other tabs do not.
The search box and the address bar have been fused into a hybrid "Omnibox," which includes suggestions for URLs culled from your browser's history and search suggestions from your search engine.
          It also remembers site-specific search engine results. There's also Application Shortcuts, a feature that lets you create desktop icons for Web-only applications, such as Gmail or Calendar. The stealth mode, Incognito, lets you surf without the history recording cookies. With version 3, themes have been introduced to Chrome and users can reskin the browser with more than 30 choices--not quite the depth of Firefox, but they don't seem to negatively affect performance.
        A developer's version of Chrome supports extensions, which haven't made it into this stable release yet. If you're addicted to Web apps and a need for speed, though, Chrome just might be the shine your browsing experience has been looking for.
Download Google Chrome