I know that lauding anything from Microsoft is a bit like taking the side of the Empire in the Star Wars saga. After all, in the computing world, everyone hates a winner. So everyone hates Microsoft.

But that's no reason to hate its newly released browser. In fact, if you put your prejudices aside for a moment, you'll discover something really quite remarkable: Microsoft has released the greatest browser there is. Tabbed browsing, superb RSS handling, and dramatically improved security all make IE the best browser on the market.

At long last, tabs

It's a mystery why Microsoft took so long to introduce tabs to IE, but now that it has, it's leapfrogged the competition. It's simple to launch, close, and rearrange tabs. Unlike all the other browsers in this roundup, IE7 does not put an "X" close button on every tab that's open, just the active tab. Move to a new tab and the X comes too -- an elegant and space-saving way to manage multiple tabs.

Better yet is the Quick Tabs feature, which lets you display all your tabs as thumbnails on a single page. Click any thumbnail to go to that tab; click its X to close it.