As the web apps we rely on get increasingly complex, we need fast browsers, otherwise the web will begin to feel very sluggish. When Opera 10 was released, I pointed out that while its JavaScript performance wasn’t bad, it couldn’t match the speed of Chrome or Firefox — and since then both Chrome and Firefox have got faster.

So how does Opera’s latest release stack up? Running the latest versions of Opera, Chrome and Firefox through the SunSpider benchmark tests on my test laptop produced some interesting results (I’ve also included the previous version of Opera for comparison):

The chart shows SunSpider scores in milliseconds, where a lower score is better. Opera’s improvement in this release is staggering — the new beta takes roughly a sixth of the time to complete the tests. Opera 10.5 narrowly beats Chrome, so Opera’s “fastest browser on Earth” claim seems justified. It also scores a perfect 100 on the Acid3 test, which tests for compliance with web standards.

Of course, raw speed and web standards aren’t everything, but Opera comes with a nicely designed UI and some neat features, like “speed dial” (for quickly accessing commonly used web pages) and a “turbo mode” for slow or laggy connections. When Opera 10.5 beta is released for Mac (it’s only in alpha currently), it may just become my new favorite browser.

Let us know what you think of Opera 10.5 below.

Firefox 3.6b1 seems quite stable and certainly feels a wee bit faster than 3.5, so to test it out I ran it through the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark on my test machine. This new version got a score of 1996 ms, which is quite an improvement over 3.5’s score of 2500 ms.

Meanwhile, as reported by Kevin over at jkOnTheRun, the new beta of Google Chrome 4 on Windows sports a fancy mechanism that syncs bookmarks across devices almost instantly — very handy if you work on a few different machines. The bookmark syncing mechanism uses XMPP (the same technology used by Google Talk) to share the bookmarks. As Kevin notes, surely secure sharing of passwords and cookies must be in the cards as well.

Running the Chrome 4 beta through the same SunSpider benchmark test, I got a score of 1122 ms, which beats Firefox by a considerable margin and is even faster than the last version of Chrome that I tested.

While in real life usage it doesn’t feel like there’s much difference between the two betas, as we come to rely more on JavaScript-heavy web apps, performance becomes increasingly important — so the great improvement in the benchmark scores shown by both of these new betas is encouraging.

If you’re trying out either of these betas, let us know what you think of them below.

Save Things for Later

Sometimes we don’t have time to read entire articles or blog posts, but we don’t want to miss out on the information we’ve discovered. We all have some way of saving things to read later. Usually it entails simply bookmarking the link, either locally in the browser or, even better, online with a social bookmarking service such as Delicious.

My personal favorite way of saving things to read later is the aptly-named ReadItLater. It’s an extremely simple service. After you add its button to your browser, you’ll be able to add any web page you’re viewing to your ReadItLater list with a single click. For example, let’s say you’re on a page you want to save, simply click the checkmark to the right of the URL for that page.

In order to read all of the links you’ve saved for later, simply click the ReadItLater button to display them.

When you’re done reading the link, or don’t feel you need to read it after all, simply uncheck the same checkmark, which removes the link from your list. You can also sync your ReadItLater lists between computers, and it also has a handy iPhone app. I find this a much quicker and simpler way to save links that I want to investigate further when I have more time to do so. Using Delicious method would require a much more involved process, including tagging each link and then deleting them, as well as marking them private, because you wouldn’t want these temporary bookmarked pages to get pushed into your social networking stream.

Subscribe and Run

I love Google Reader and really appreciate its handy “Subscribe” toolbar button, which allows you to quickly subscribe to any site’s RSS feed. Yes, the RSS icon is usually prominently displayed on every blog these days but not always. Also, clicking the RSS icon merely begins the process of subscribing to that particular blog.

The Subscribe button is a quick shortcut straight to your Google Reader where you just verify the subscription and you are done. To grab it just go to Google Reader and click the “Settings” option and head to the “Goodies” area. Then drag and drop the subscribe button on your browser’s toolbar and you are done.

Speedy Shopping Cart

There are a ton of wishlist services out there, but ever since Amazon released its universal wishlist I’ve given them all up for good. Amazon was the first site to provide the ability to add items to a wishlist, but the problem with that service was that it was totally restricted to only merchandise that you could find or purchase on their site. Opening up the wishlist to allow you to save products from any online store was a brilliant stroke of genius on Amazon’s part. While it might not carry every brand you add to your wishlist, they keep customers connected to its store and manage to sell a great deal more product than they would have otherwise.

So, no matter where I am online, whenever I come across an item I might be interested in purchasing for myself or someone else, all I have to do is click the wishlist button on my browser’s toolbar and the Amazon wishlist window pops up. For example, I have wishlists for each of my three children and spouse, not just for myself. You can do the same for friends, relatives, colleagues, etc.

Quick To-Do Lists

Another indispensable browser button is super-quick access to Google Tasks. Yes, you can get to Tasks many ways, such as within Gmail or from iGoogle as a widget, but for me the quickest and best way to add an item to my to do lists is via a sidebar in Firefox. Here’s how simple it is to do:

1. Drag and drop Google Tasks to your browser’s toolbar.
2. Right-click the button and select properties.
3. Select the option to “Load this bookmark in the sidebar” and click “OK.”

Note-taking on the Go

Evernote has a handy bookmarklet and Firefox extension for its Webclipper tool that allows you to add notes and portions of any web page to your account quickly and easily. Once you set it up, all you have to do is click and save the page or any piece of it to your account.

These were just a few of my favorite browser buttons and bookmarklets that help save me lots of time. There are many more out there but these should be enough to get you started.

What are some of your favorite browser tools that help you save time? Please share them in the comments.

The interesting thing about this browser is that it includes the three rendering engines that are found in Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari/Chrome. There are a few reasons why this browser may be worth adding to your arsenal, even if you don’t use it as your default.

As you can see in the screenshot above, Lunascape asks you whether you want its default rendering engine to be Trident (found in Internet Explorer), Gecko (the same version found in Firefox 3.5) or WebKit (found in Safari and Chrome). You can either manually set Lunascape to use a particular rendering engine, or you can have it select one to use on the fly for optimized performance. Lunascape officials claim that the JavaScript performance in their browser is actually faster than in Firefox 3.5. If it is, the difference is minimal, but there are a few other reasons why this browser is worth having on hand.

If you regularly use multiple browsers, as I do, you’re probably familiar with the fact that many pages render differently on different browsers. There are also certain kinds of live-streamed events, such as webcasts, that look very different depending on the rendering engine in your browser. Lunascape can level the playing field, and let you quickly get to the properly rendered version of a page at which you’re looking.

Lunascape is also used by some web developers and designers who want to rifle through the popular rendering engines on the fly as they create things, to see how they look and to monitor any errors. I suspect most readers won’t use Lunascape as their primary browser, but it’s worth having on hand when you want to switch rendering engines without jumping in and out of browsers.

Have you tried Lunascape? Let us know your thoughts on this new browser in the comments.

Mozilla’s post says only that the updates in Release Candidate 3 are in response to “user feedback.” The organization intends to move quickly toward a final release of Firefox Version 3.5. In all likelihood, the differences between this version and RC2 consist of bug and/or security fixes.

I’ve been steadily using both the betas and the Release Candidates of Firefox 3.5, and it’s both speedy and substantially more feature-rich. It’s stable, too. If you’re already running a Firefox 3.5 beta or Release Candidate version, you can obtain an update to RC3 by selecting “Check for Updates” from the “Help” menu. Here are the official Release Notes for more information.

In Firefox 3, there was support for color profiles in tagged images, but it was disabled by default. Christopher Blizzard has a good post up on the support for color correction for tagged images found in Firefox 3.5. He compares images rendered by Firefox 3, Firefox 3.5 and Photoshop.

Firefox 3.5 has support for web fonts (check out this video of Opera CTO Håkon Wium Lie demonstrating web fonts to Aliza), and you can find a good demonstration of how to use them and some of the new CSS features in the browser here.

One of the biggest new additions in Firefox 3.5 is the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, which can really speed up many web applications. Here, you can find a good video demonstration of what TraceMonkey brings to the table, comparing Firefox 3.5 to Firefox 3.

There are new geolocation features built into Firefox 3.5, and you can find a good discussion of how to work with them here. Some users don’t want the geolocation features enabled for privacy reasons. If you want to disable them, Lifehacker has a good description of how to do so here.

Especially if you’re a web developer using Firefox 3.5, it’s a good idea to keep up with the posts at Mozilla Hacks on how to use the many new features. The folks posting the demos are from Mozilla, and the information runs pretty deep, so it should help you get the very best out of your new browser.

Have you switched to Firefox 3.5 RC? If so, what new features do you find yourself excited about or using most?

Well, here’s your chance. Forget about Firefox extensions and IE rendering modes and Safari speed and Opera standards-compliance for the moment, and imagine you’ve got a line into the development teams. What features are you missing in the current crop of browsers that would actually make your life easier and more productive? What promises do you wish they’d deliver on? What would make you switch to a new browser for your own web work?

While all that’s going on, you can explore the various menus and shortcuts that Navigaya has to chunks of web. These are customizable with your own links too, but the starting set is a good portal to many common sites, categorized into areas like “maps” or “fashion”. Their Category menu gives you browsable news from many sources at once, with headlines and videos as well. All in all, it’s a surprisingly engaging way to explore the web, though I don’t know that I’d try to use it when I wanted to get serious work done.

Even within those broad categories, though, the market is more fragmented than ever before: Firefox 2 and 3 are both in substantial use, as are IE6 and IE7. It’s worse in some markets; I have one customer who requires IE5.5 compatibility due to restrictions on browser version at a government agency. Some people want to address this by campaigning against IE6, but that still seems quixotic to me. With no end in sight to new versions, and intense competition in the browser market, it seems like this problem will only keep getting worse.

If you create web pages, what’s your testing strategy? What browsers do you consider important enough to check?