NEW YORK -- With all the attention on the new Firefox 3 Internet browser, it's easy to miss two strong, innovative rivals.
Opera 9.5, for instance, lets you share bookmarked Web pages and notes among several computers. And another browser, Flock 2, brings Firefox 3's improvements to an already strong system for sharing photos and blog entries and linking friends on social-networking sites such as Facebook.
Developed by the Mozilla open-source community of mostly volunteers, Firefox 3 showcases the "awesome bar." Start typing anything into the address bar, and you'll find letters and words jump around as Firefox 3 attempts to suggest up to 12 sites, with priority given to those you most recently visited or manually typed in. I wouldn't call it "awesome," but it's quite impressive and useful.
Firefox 3 also brings speed and security improvements. Sites known to engage in "phishing" scams or the distribution of malicious software are now automatically blocked. The address bar turns partially green for sites that have passed vigorous background checks by outside parties.
The new browser also lets you launch Web-based e-mail rather than a stand-alone desktop program when clicking on basic "contact us" links within Web pages, though only Yahoo Inc.'s service is supported.
Firefox 2 users will do well to upgrade, and others should consider a switch.
Those drawn to Firefox 3's "awesome bar" also may want to consider Opera Software ASA's new offering, which checks the entire Web page visited for matches, not just the title and address. Opera 9.5 also supports the security background checks and has its own security filters. But Opera won't open up Web-based e-mail when you click on "contact us" links.
What Opera does have is a tool for more easily finding specific words or phrases within a Web page. Simply type the period and a few characters, and all matches are automatically highlighted, not just one at a time like most other browsers. (Apple Inc.'s Safari comes closest to matching Opera.)
A handy feature called Speed Dial lets you see miniature versions of nine favorite sites at a glance.
Opera also remains the only major browser with built-in support for BitTorrent file sharing. But the new features aren't enough for me to ditch Firefox.
That said, I'm most impressed by Flock, which shares Firefox's core, open-source technology. Flock 2, just out as a "beta" test, primarily adds Firefox 3 upgrades to the current 1.2 version, including the "awesome bar" and security enhancements.
But Flock already has Web-based support for "contact us" links -- not only with Yahoo but with Google Inc.'s Gmail and Time Warner Inc.'s AOL services, too -- and a browser icon lets you check for new e-mail messages without first going to that site.
Flock has a built-in blog composer and photo uploader that works with major services, along with a media bar for accessing the latest on Google's YouTube and Yahoo's Flickr. You can drag a photo from the media bar and drop it right into your blog entry or a MySpace comments field.
Though Flock is the least known of the alternatives, it is the strongest of the browsers I tested, smartly adapting to how people increasingly use the Internet for generating and sharing content.
First Published: June 29, 2008, 8:00 a.m.
