1. IE 7 includes tabbed browsing, a capability that Firefox and Opera have offered for a while.

2. IE 7 has an integrated search box similar to that in Firefox and Opera.

3. Both IE 7 and Firefox 1.5 offer an easy method for deleting personal browsing data (browser cache, URL history, saved forms) via one menu option. The feature already exists in Opera 8.5.

4. Firefox 1.5 offer automatic updates similar to IE.

5. Opera comes with several advanced features that you can get in Firefox only with add-ons, and that IE lacks entirely.

Erik Larkin compares the three most popular browser on earth – Internet Explorer 7 Beta 1, Firefox 1.5 Release Candidate 1, and Opera 9 Preview 1. He also mentions Flock, a social browsing application. Flock rethinks the browser as a tool for creating Weblogs, organizing bookmarks and connecting with others online.

IE 7: The new Phishing Filter in IE aims to warn users if they visit a known or potential phishing site–a function previously available only via third-party toolbars.

Firefox 1.5: Firefox 1.5 includes drag-and-drop tab reordering. The new Auto-update process is streamlined and smooth.

Opera 9: Users can choose which Web sites can run JavaScript or display images. And the impressive built-in RSS feed handler now supports Atom 1.0. However, Opera has no plans to introduce Firefox-like extensions, so if you don’t like the way it does something, you’re stuck.

Browser Market Share: Though IE has been losing market share, it remains dominant yet. The number of users jumping to Firefox has slowed recently leading some experts to suggest only a finite number of people are willing or able to try an alternate browser.

Read full story at PCWorld – Browser Face-Off

The Google Custom Search Engine service will let anyone, from individuals to organisations, put a Google-powered search box on their websites that only searches certain sites and pages. That way, the publisher of a website about hockey for example, could put a search box on his home page that only returns links to pages about that sport that he hand-picked. The service will also let publishers have a search engine that taps Google’s index in full but gives preference to results from websites they have pre-selected.

With Custom Search Engine, Google joins others that provide similar services, including Yahoo and Rollyo. These custom engines are part of the social search concept, which taps users to refine the search engine experience by contributing, categorizing, tagging and sharing search results. For example, site publishers using the Google service can let others contribute to their custom index.

Designed to be extremely easy and intuitive to use, the service will let site publishers build their own search engine in a matter of minutes through the use of menus and wizards, Google’s vice-president of search products and user experience, Marissa Mayer, said.

The service is hosted on Google servers, so site publishers don’t get access to search query logs, a sensitive topic for users who are concerned about the privacy of their search activities. However, the entire search experience happens in the publishers’ sites, and they can personalise the search results page so that its layout is in tune with the rest of their pages, Mayer said. Google will display contextual ads with search results, but sites run by government agencies, nonprofit organisations and universities can opt out of this.

Google stood to benefit not only from sharing ad revenue with publishers but also from propagating the availability of its search engine, analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence, Greg Sterling, said.

“People are doing searches on all kinds of websites, not just search engines,” he said. “Search has become the Web’s navigational paradigm.”

Meanwhile, there was considerable demand from publishers for custom search engines because they realised that providing that capability made their websites more attractive to their visitors, Sterling said.

The new service will become available Monday night (US time) at http://www.google.com/coop/cse

The service provides documents and spreadsheets, and while many users also need presentation capabilities — if only occasionally — there’s no question these are the two main pillars of office usage.

As to be expected, Docs & Spreadsheets is an online service. The docs part came from Google’s purchase of Upstartle and its Writely online collaboration service with the spreadsheet component developed internally at Google Labs.

Having another office option causes us to examine, once again, how much is enough — and having it available online leads to a comparison with Microsoft’s Office Live online offering.

I’ve lost count of the number of applications that can open and manipulate .doc files on Windows, Linux, Mac or live on the Web. And though each has limitations, the more alternatives that are available the less the limitations seem to matter.

Return to your youth for a moment and conjure up a vision of the overlapping circles of the Venn diagrams you learned about in school.

Think of each circle representing a Microsoft Office alternative overlapping where they share a common feature or function. Each newcomer duplicates what it believes is the core set of functions required to be viable. While there will be differences among vendors, there will be a significant overlap as each vendor opts for the most significant functions.

As users, if we can confine ourselves to this core set of functions, we have documents that are almost universally accessible. This is a strong motivation to reduce the features and functions we use in building our Office documents.

Moving to the online element, Microsoft Office Live is much more. Its two fee-based offerings, Live Essentials and Live Collaboration, appear to overlap the basic Docs & Spreadsheets functions but really seem to be focused on attracting businesses that want to outsource not only their Web site hosting but also hosting of business applications and storage. Office Live appears to be a true software-as-a-service offering.

So, while a direct comparison is probably not appropriate, it is worthwhile to understand what Google’s Docs & Spreadsheets can bring you — especially because it is free.

You can move, copy and save documents easily from your local machine to your Google storage and convert them to, say, PDF, RTF or OpenOffice in the process. You can e-mail them to a special version of your GMail address and a few minutes later there they are online. Collaboration with other GMail users is just a click away.

So while Docs & Spreadsheets isn’t likely to cause tremors in the corporate IT world, small/midsize business and corporate users might, as they have in the past, start a grass-roots movement in this direction. Enterprise architects would do well to have a look for themselves.

Google has expanded its controversial book search service to allow people to download whole copies of books in PDF format to their computers, with the ability to print them out.

The feature will go live Wednesday at the service’s Web site (http://books.google.com), said Adam Smith, group product manager of Google Book Search and Google Scholar.

The books available for download will only be those that are in the public domain and thus not protected by copyright, Smith said. Until now, people have been able to read these public-domain books on the Google Book Search Web site, but not download and print them, he said.

Google will not allow downloading of copyrighted books, not even those for which it has obtained permission from the copyright holders to display their full text, Smith said.

The vast majority of the public-domain books available for download have been scanned as part of the library project of the Google Book Search service, Smith said. For the project, Google is scanning portions of the collections of some of the world’s largest academic libraries, including Google partners Harvard University, Stanford University and Oxford University.

However, critics say Google can’t scan copyrighted books it obtains from the libraries unless it gets permission from the copyright holders. The issue is at the center of two separate lawsuits brought against Google last year, one by The Authors Guild and three authors, and another one by The Association of American Publishers on behalf of five of its members: The McGraw-Hill Companies, Pearson Education, Penguin Group USA, Simon & Schuster and John Wiley & Sons.

Google’s free Web log service, Blogger, is once again accessible from Beijing without the use of a proxy server, indicating that apparent government efforts to block the site have been lifted.

Access to Blogger was restored on Thursday. The site has largely been inaccessible from China since late 2002, when government censors apparently blocked access to Google’s search engine and other sites. Last year, Blogger was accessible during a three-month period that stretched from mid-October until December, when the service once again became inaccessible.

Chinese officials rarely discuss their Internet censorship efforts.The lack of disclosure sometimes makes it difficult to determine when a site is being blocked or is not accessible for technical reasons. However, in cases such as Blogger, where a site is inaccessible for long periods of time, the culprit is usually government intervention.

The lack of access to Blogger has not affected the growing popularity of blogs in China. Of China’s 123 million Internet users, 24 percent report reading blogs “frequently,” according to a recent study by the China Internet Network Information Center, which tracks Internet usage habits.

Today, there are dozens of Chinese Web sites that offer blog services in addition to U.S.-based services, such as Microsoft’s MSN Spaces and Six Apart’s TypePad services, which can be accessed in China.

The problem apparently stems from the review process Google performs on the Checkout transactions to prevent fraud. While they applaud antifraud efforts, users of this high-profile service, which was launched in late June, say Google needs to speed up the review process and improve its review-related customer service and communications. Otherwise, Checkout, which observers have characterized as a potential “killer” of rival service PayPal, risks failure, some warn.

Google hasn’t replied to a request for comment, but at its Web site, Google explains that it employs standard credit-card verification methods in Checkout, as well as more specialized risk modeling, fraud detection and manual reviews if deemed necessary. Moreover, in the official Checkout discussion board for merchants (http://groups.google.com/group/google-checkout-merchants-forum), a Google staffer in the Checkout team routinely posts comments and answers under the name GoogleCheckoutPro, and on July 27 addressed the review delay issue, saying Google is committed to fighting fraud and minimizing risk.

“I know there’s frustration about the delays due to the order review process,” the official wrote, adding to what is one of the longest threads on the board with over 30 postings. “At times it may seem we are overly cautious, especially when an order from someone you know personally is being held up. We are working as fast as possible to fix this issue. The good news is that we have some upcoming changes which will both speed up the review process and make it more effective at filtering out the bad guys.”

The planned changes may come too late for a disappointed buyer. “I’d have to hear a lot of good things about Checkout before I try it again,” says Rhys Ludlow, who tried buying a camera from RitzCamera.com using Checkout.

After four days, with the order still under review, Ludlow contacted RitzCamera.com and was told the Checkout approval process could take a week. This floored him.

“These days you expect things to move at the speed of, you know, the Internet,” says Ludlow. He needed the US$106 camera for his business Ludlow Media Services in Corte Madera, California.

He canceled the transaction and bought the camera directly from RitzCamera.com over the phone. Ritz Interactive, which runs RitzCamera.com, declined to comment.

Review glitches also affect merchants. A corporate client attempted to buy a photo from David Sanger’s Web site, but Checkout unilaterally and without warning canceled the order.

After several attempts, a flustered Sanger reached a Checkout official by phone. This official acknowledged a Google mistake in canceling the order when Checkout couldn’t match the buyer’s name with the credit card number. This is a common discrepancy when employees use corporate credit cards. The official told Sanger that Google was aware of this problem and that his client should try again.

Google again axed the transaction.

“I apologized to the client. It was very embarrassing for me and for her,” Sanger, a professional photographer, says. She sent him a check overnight via a commercial courier service.

“They really need to improve their communications with people. They need a 24-7 customer support call center or at least rapid-response e-mail support,” Sanger says.

Sanger, who lives in San Francisco, hopes Google improves Checkout, because for the most part he likes the service and finds it can save him time and effort in the processing of orders.

Michael Adberg, who beta tested Checkout, calls it a “wonderful” service, except for the review delays, which have prompted complaints from some customers. Luckily, Adberg, co-founder of Weaknees, a TiVo products and services provider in Los Angeles, hasn’t lost sales. The review process has gotten faster but “I hope it comes down further,” he says.

Meanwhile, Kirby Witmer reports problems both as buyer and merchant.

He attempted two different purchases from Buy.com Inc., but both transactions failed due to what Google described to him later as Checkout technical “issues,” giving him “a 100 percent failure rate,” he wrote via e-mail. Getting the orders canceled took over two weeks and multiple communications with Google and Buy.com. Buy.com didn’t reply to a request for comment.

As a merchant, Witmer, who runs computer sales and repair business KirbTech had — you guessed it — a client’s order delayed while Google reviewed it.

When asked for Checkout improvement suggestions, he offers only one: “Eliminate or streamline the process of reviewing the order.”

As of today, users can sign-up to Google’s Web-based e-mail program by simply registering on the site www.gmail.com

“As we prepare to broaden availability, we have decided to launch these efforts in Australia and New Zealand first,” said a Google Australia spokesperson. “We understand the extreme interest and passion that people around the world have for Gmail and we look forward to making Gmail generally available in more places as soon as we are able.”

No other changes have affected the Gmail accounts which still offer over 2.7GB of free space, built-in Google search technology and spam protection.

Although still in beta form, the company plans to release a final version once “strong internal metrics” are met.

“We’ll take Gmail out of beta once we feel we’ve met these metrics,” the spokesperson said. “However, users should know that Gmail is reliable and is quickly becoming more widely available. In fact, tens of millions of users around the world already depend on Gmail every day.