Whenever we think about browsers we always think about performance, system resources and features – never about how much energy it consumes. However, when you think about it, it is one feature that is very important, as many of us will be viewing the browser on a laptop.

Looking at the graph you will see how many watts and how long the battery life on the test laptop while browsing news websites lasts. Opera 11 looked to be the most power hungry, with Firefox 4 coming in second next to Internet Explorer 9.

Three tests were run in all on the Intel laptop running Windows 7, the first was just to open a blank page, the second a new website and the third test was to run Galactic. Visit Mashable for all four graphs. Now we do not know about you, but we care more about how fast a browser is rather than getting a couple more minutes out of the battery on a laptop.

Is energy-efficiency important to you when it comes to choosing a browser?

More About: Internet Explorer 9, web browser

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Just a few hours ago we told you that Mozilla had put the full version of Firefox on their FTP servers for anyone to download, despite the fact that the browser isn’t officially released until sometime tomorrow (March 22).

Meanwhile, Microsoft went live with Internet Explorer 9 on March 14th, and followed this with an announcement saying that they had accumulated 2.35 million downloads during the first 24 hours, a figure which they were pretty pleased with. However, as proven on our IE9 problems thread, there are a lot of you who are experiencing issues with the new version, so a patch may need to be released to keep users happy.

Then onto the silent assassin, aka Google Chrome, as Google swiftly rolled out the latest version of Chrome 10 around two weeks ago. We ran a similar problem thread which you can check out here, but there doesn’t appear to be any major problems which is a credit to Google and their team.

So with that in mind, which browser are you currently using at the moment? Excluding the likes of Safari and Opera, we want to know which browser you think is the best in terms of speed and overall performance. We’re going to put our necks on the line to say that most of you won’t be choosing IE9, so we think it’s a dogfight between Chrome 10 and Firefox 4.

Vote in our poll below and we’ll be posting the results of it after your feedback.

[poll id="327"]

More About: chrome 10, Firefox 4, Internet Explorer 9

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It has been confirmed that Microsoft managed to achieve 2.35 million downloads in the first 24 hours of becoming available to download, as reported from Engadget. You may think that this number is pretty impressive for a day, but it’s nothing to what Mozilla achieved with Firefox back in 2008.

Microsoft is obviously proud of their 24 hour stats for Internet Explorer, even giving themselves a pat on the back with the words, ‘wow’. On the other hand, Mozilla can counter with their own ‘wow’ since Firefox 3 racked up 8 million downloads in 24 hours back in 2008 just to put things in perspective for you.

Is this a clear sign that Internet Explorer is firmly behind in the pecking order against the likes of Firefox, Chrome and Safari? Probably, but let’s wait and see how IE9 manages to perform over the weekend, since downloads are surely going to multiply over Saturday and Sunday.

Are you impressed by the 2.35 million download figure or not? Did you download IE9? Don’t forget to check out our IE9 problem thread here.

More About: ie9, Internet Explorer 9, microsoft

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We are now hearing that using IE9 on a PC powered by AMD technology will result in better video and graphics performance on the web, this is because IE9′s hardware acceleration can take advantage of the AMD Fusion Family APU and AMD Radeon graphics cards. Not only can we expect better performance but it will not have a negative affect on power consumption, which means laptops and tablets will be able to boast better battery life.

If you are sceptical AMD are offering you the chance to win your own HP Pavillion DM1Z notebook to try it out first yourself, these notebooks use AMD’s new Fusion APUs, if you want a chance to win one of the notebooks head over to www.IE9heartsAPU.com.

You can also head over to AMD’s official blog to find out more about why pairing IE9 with AMD technology is the way forward, in short HD video playback should be smoother, websites should be more responsive, graphics will be clearer and colors should be more vivid, sounds like a win-win to us.

Will you upgrade to an AMD-based solution to get a richer IE9 experience? (The video we have embedded below shows just how great hardware acceleration really is!

More About: amd, AMD Fusion, Internet Explorer 9, microsoft

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Our writers at Product-Reviews mainly use Google Chrome, Apple Safari or Mozilla Firefox, this is mainly due to the fact that previous Internet Explorer releases seemed sluggish in comparison, however it has to be said that Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 is by far the greatest IE version yet.

The features which Microsoft seem most happy with include IE9′s new simplified user interface, its hardware acceleration capabilities and its HTML5 support, you find out more about IE9′s top features here.

If you are using a previous version of Internet Explorer we strongly recommend that you download Internet Explorer 9 for its enhanced security, however you need to be running either Windows Vista or Windows 7, Windows XP and other operating systems are not supported. If you are running a supported OS you download IE9 here.

Below we have added a poll to get some feedback from our readers, feel free to answer the poll question and share your opinions in the comments section.

[poll id="323"]

More About: Internet Explorer, Internet Explorer 9, microsoft

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If you haven’t downloaded IE9 yet, you can do so over at Microsoft’s Beauty of the Web page here. It’s only available for PC users at the moment and you may be disappointed to hear that Windows XP is not supported, only Windows 7, Vista, and Windows Server 2008 for the time being.

Aside from a completely revamped User Interface, Internet Explorer 9 will benefit from much faster overall performance thanks to a brand new javascript engine called Chakra. You’ll also get a security-enabled download manager, address bar search and many more features.

While there may not be any noticable problems with IE9 now since the download has only been up for a few hours, it is inevitable that problems and bugs will filter out in the coming weeks, so if you notice anything serious with the software that you feel we should know about, leave us a comment below.

Our only problem with Internet Explorer 9 right now, is that Mac is not supported at the moment. We’re hoping that Microsoft is planning to change this though since it’s in their best interests to make it available on all operating systems.

More About: ie9, Internet Explorer 9, microsoft

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Microsoft first launched the beta for Internet Explorer last September and had over two million downloads in just two days, which rose to an astonishing eleven million in only eighteen days. Microsoft has announced that the IE9 release date will be March 14, which is the final version and not the RC download, according to an article over at TechRadar by Kate Solomon.

The download is set to begin at 9pm pacific time, so in the UK downloads will actually start on the 15th. Because of the numbers with the beta, the amount that actually download the final version could be a lot higher.

Microsoft has had the candidate form out for a few weeks now, but the company has said there is more to come. Senior director of Internet Explorer business and marketing – Ryan Gavin – said in a blog post “We still have a few surprises left. There are a lot of new amazing things to share.”

Will you be downloading the final version of IE9 when it becomes available?

More About: Internet Explorer 9, microsoft

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Recently ConceivablyTech.com tested out both release candidates on two of their test rigs, you can see two pages of benchmark test results here, many expected Firefox 4 RC to dominate, however in Flash and HTML5 tests IE9 RC came out on top, that said Firefox 4 RC done better in the JavaScript benchmarks.

One thing we must remember that the IE9 RC has been patched since its first release, also it is unsurprising to see that IE9 does better in the HTML5 tests as our previous post revealed how it Internet Explorer 9 was the best browser available in terms of HTML5 performance.

ConceivablyTech suggest that IE9′s hardware acceleration is what other browsers need to beat, whilst Firefox 4 is an improvement when compared to Firefox 3.x it still has a lot to do to compete with the likes of Google Chrome and regain some of its lost market share, perhaps Firefox 5 will be the version to wait for…

Have you tried out the Firefox 4 RC? If so, will you continue to use it?

More About: Internet Explorer 9, microsoft, Mozilla, Mozilla Firefox 4

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Reasons for the latter is unclear, as Mozilla has been improving Firefox’s by by fixing security holes, however many feel that a new major version is long overdue, developers are diligently working on Firefox 4, however it is certainly taking some time.

Chrome saw a rise of .2 percent from January, now reaching 10.9 percent of market share up from 10.7, whilst Internet Explorer continued its dominance in the web browsing sector, rising from 56 percent to 56.8 percent according to Net Applications on March 1.

eWeek also says that Microsoft’s newest browser, IE9 reached a 0.66 percent market share across all platforms and a firm 2 percent on the Windows 7 platform. Apple’s Safari web browser only saw a 0.4 percent rise from 6 percent to 6.4 percent.

Obviously, you would have thought that the continuing support for Internet Explorer and Google Chrome, who release a new stable version of the web browser every few weeks would take the headlines, but that is not so, more people are shocked to hear that Firefox’s market share is shrinking.

To get a better understanding of what is happening, we will turn to our readers. Which browser do you use and why?

More About: Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 9, Mozilla Firefox

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We have embedded the video at the end of this post, it shows IE9 running on an unnamed WP7 smartphone running the FishIE Tank speed test, the performance is then compared to the iPhone 4 running Safari enduring the same test, the iPhone 4′s poor performance gets a laugh from the audience.

The video then goes on to show many different aspects of IE9 for WP7, from what the video shows it looks pretty impressive, however lets not forget that it won’t go public until late 2011, between now and then we will probably see a new and improved version of Safari rolled out, and potentially an iPhone 5 release, which will undoubtedly perform better on the FishIE Tank speed test.

If you have never ran the FishIE tank speed test you can run it here, basically the more frames-per-second your browser achieves with the more fish on the screen the better, the video embedded at the end of this post shows just how important IE9′s hardware acceleration capabilities are.

Obviously just because IE9 outperforms Safari in this benchmark test it doesn’t mean that it is a superior browser, however it is nice to know that Microsoft are working hard on their mobile web browser, let’s face it Internet Explorer hasn’t exactly been pushing the boundaries lately.

Are you entirely happy with Apple Safari’s web browsing experience on your iPhone 4?

More About: Apple iPhone 4, Apple Safari, Internet Explorer 9, microsoft, Windows Phone 7

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