Like you, I like getting the most bang for my buck. With browsers, since I do not use any browsers I have to pay for, I have to figure in the time I spend familiarizing myself with the product and the add ons available to make my browsing experience easier. Time is money, and the “benees” (benefits) and ease of use are my standards. Keeping that all in mind, I was able to lay the three big names in browsing (IE7, FireFox3, and Chrome by Google) side by side and do a mini-bench test with time, benees, and ease of use as my marks. There were some surprises.

Lets start with how all three are alike. Since the inception of FF’s tab system, and IE7 playing catchup, tabs are in. They keep people who like to have a million windows open happy, and they keep people who like to keep their desktop neat (i.e. me) in a happy tension.

IE7, except for the tab function which came along after FF hit the scene, is a basic browser. For the one billion people that use PC’s worldwide, it looks safe and comfortable, but if you are wanting an enhanced web experience, IE does not deliver that well. The addition of tabs help make the IE experience much better, but you still do not have many choices in customization (outside the addition of a few buttons and third party tool bars). Crashes still occur pretty often with IE. When you crash you crash, and the only way to get back is by going into your history.

FF3, the latest offering from Mozilla, is the Swiss Army knife of browsers. With all of their Open Source ninjas working on its improvement, there are endless possibilities. The look and feel, without add-ons, is the experience you would be familiar with in IE, however, there are a LOT of add-ons, that are easily found and downloaded: the Open Source community see to that.

What if you crash? Well FF3 allows you to restore the session you were just in. Plus, if you are moving over to FF from IE, you can import all of your booksmarks and homepage settings: no need to manually recreate all the stuff you need.

Chrome, Googles cannonball into the world of browsers, really, at first glance is all fluff and no huff. It is not intuitive to use, nor does it offer anything visually that would attract the most shallow web-surfer. It does keep a visual list of your favorites right at the top page.

Right now, I am not finding much use for Chrome as I can use IE and FF way more easily. If Chrome is the browser “grown up” it really needs to come back out when it can shave.