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Over the past year, every major browser has undergone an equally major revision. Sometimes the revisions are reflected to the left of the decimal point, sometimes to the right, but always with big changes in functionality, performance, and under-the-hood optimizations.

The results have provided the best crop of choices for Web browsing in a long time -- possibly since Firefox 1.0 appeared and made one's choice of Web browser a topic of serious competition once again.

What draws people to a particular browser? Speed, reliability, features, or some combination of those factors -- the hands-on experiences. So rather than talk mainly about performance benchmarks or ACID test compliance, I'll focus on what the biggest draw for each browser is -- the best and worst features, reasons to switch from others browsers, and a few notes on where each one is going.

Chrome 2.0
Google, Inc.

Nobody expected Google to release a browser, but here we are. Chrome's already in its second major revision and still developing by leaps and bounds. Its future as a platform unto itself is intriguing, but it's a good browser right now thanks to its speed, lean design, a solid spate of developer's tools built into the product, and a smart internal architecture. Future revisions ought to be nothing short of a knockout.

A big part of what makes Chrome so snappy is what's on the inside. Multiple tabs and windows each run in their own distinct process; if one of them crashes or hangs (for instance, due to a plug-in gone wild), it won't cause the others to blow up. End result: on modern dual- or multi-core hardware, multiple tabs or windows open in Chrome still run fast.

IE has had something like this for a while, albeit implemented differently; Firefox is moving toward such an execution model, but it's still in the planning stages. That said, the bookmark manager could still use some work: for instance, there's no tagging of bookmarks as there is in Firefox, which is a handy way to assign something more than one categorization at once.

Chrome's good for browsing, but it's also being incrementally turned into a platform through which Google intends to deliver more of its OS-neutral Web applications -- Gmail, Docs, and so on. To that end, some of its best features are those aimed at developers: its JavaScript engine, and especially its object inspector for Web pages. The latter is spectacular, rivaling that of some standalone Web-page development applications -- you can manually inject properties into any element on a page and not only see but interact directly with the results.