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I was never a fan of the original Dolphin browser for Android, but when DolphinHD was released for Android 2.0 and above I figured I'd check it out for the feature set alone. Little did I know that within a day I'd make it the default browser on my Motorola Droid.

Much like the Skyfire browser, which boasts unique in-house Flash video playback, DolphinHD's feature set gives users significant feature enhancements over the default browser. There's tabbed browsing, link sharing via your installed social networking apps, add-ons, themes, smoother in-browser multitouch, a generally high level of customization, the ability to save your cache and history to the SD card, and one of the most logical features for a touch-screen phone browser, customizable gesture support.

There used to be one other awesome feature: YouTube video downloading. But lest you think that only Apple played hardball with its application developers, Google forced Dolphin's publishers to remove the feature for a Google and YouTube Terms of Service violation within a week of the browser's release.

For me, the gesture support is Dolphin's killer feature. It comes with several default actions, including jumping to your bookmarks, moving forward and backward in site navigation, jumping to the top or bottom of the page you're on, reloading the page you're looking at, and sharing the page you're on. You can also set gestures to load specific sites, open new tabs, or add a bookmark. In all, Dolphin comes with 20 gesture options. A few have been wedded by default to predetermined gestures, but you can overwrite them easily with motions more to your liking, or move the gesture hot corner around. … Read more

Mozilla hopes to release Firefox 4 in October or November, a new version that has speed among its top goals.

"Performance is a huge, huge, huge thing for us," said Mike Beltzner, vice president of engineering for Firefox, in a Webcast on Tuesday about plans for the browser. "We created the performance story, and we've got to keep at it."

Among other features planned for Firefox 4--and Mozilla emphatically cautions that plans can change--are support for high-speed graphics and text through Direct2D on Windows; a tidier user interface with more prominent and powerful tabs; support … Read more

Browser add-on Xmarks has introduced a major new synchronization feature over the past few weeks for its multiple browser plug-ins that lets users sync open tabs across multiple browsers and computers. The new feature (download Xmarks for Firefox | Chrome | Internet Explorer | Safari) offers far better control over tab opening than merely forcing all your tabs to appear on all your computers and browsers. Instead, Xmarks politely tells you which tabs are synced under which browsers and lets you open them individually.

Once the add-on is installed, you'll be asked to create an account if you don't have one. … Read more

Opera 10 maintains the program's tradition of striving for the fastest, smallest, and most full-featured browser available. Opera covers the basics with tabbed browsing, mouse-over previews, a customizable search bar, advanced bookmarking tools, and simple integration with e-mail and chat clients. Mouse-gesture support, keyboard shortcuts, and drag-and-drop functionality round out the essentials. Opera 10.52 marks the Mac debut of the Carakan JavaScript engine, which the publisher claims is 10 times faster than the previous version. Even in the middle of benchmarking tests, that claim doesn't seem far-fetched.

Opera's extras push it to among the top of … Read more

There's no doubt that Windows 7 is the most polished operating system Microsoft has released, but that doesn't mean there's no room for improvement. This collection of free utilities great and small will give you tools to change a significant amount of Windows 7's behavior, from the look of the Start button to hulking out Windows Explorer with FTP powers.

Before we get to gritty fine-tuning apps, let's start with some of the more-aesthetic ones. The aforementioned Windows 7 Start Button Changer is a one-hit wonder. Calling it a "wonder" may be a … Read more

Alt+Tab Tuner gives you granular control over Windows 7's Alt+Tab preview and window-switching hot-key combo. That's pretty much all it does, but it's an incredible depth of fine-tuning.

Users can adjust the margins on the top, bottom, or side of the global preview window; change the number of columns and rows that those previews appear in; and change the amount of spacing between each preview thumbnail. Users can also tweak the program icon location and size; the preview thumbnail size; the milliseconds the global preview window takes to fade out; and the opacity of the … Read more

Internet Explorer has lost a lot of ground in the browser wars as alternatives like Firefox and Chrome have become more popular. IE isn't nearly the ubiquitous browser it once was, but every now and then you run across a Web site that's still not equipped to handle any browsers but that one. IE Tab for Google Chrome is a clever browser extension that tricks persnickety IE-only sites into working in Chrome.

IE Tab for Google Chrome appears as a small icon to the right of Chrome's address bar. It's incredibly easy to use. Let's … Read more

We love tabbed browsing, but we often find ourselves with tons of tabs open. Sometimes they're simply things we forgot to close when we were done with them, but other times they contain pages that we want to return to. TooManyTabs for Chrome is a clever browser extension that helps you hang on to the tabs you're not done with without all the clutter.

TooManyTabs isn't the most intuitive application we've ever used, but after a bit of experimentation, it was pretty easy to figure out. It appears as an icon to the right of Chrome'… Read more

There are several excellent bookmark-syncing extensions for Firefox, but Weave is the first major effort designed by Mozilla. The newest version of Weave is out of beta and supports more than just bookmark sync. It also supports syncing open tabs, history, passwords, preferences, and Firefox 3's advanced Location Bar data.

The add-on lives in your tools menu, in your Options menu, and in a Status Bar icon. From clicking on any of them, you can check your syncing log, create a user account and password, and toggle sync settings. The default is to sync all, but choosing the customization … Read more