Just last week we compared four PC browsers and concluded that IE8 was the slowest, Safari the fastest and Firefox the most expandable - but we thought that Chrome was nipping at everyone else's heels.

A week is a long time on the Internet, though, and we now have two even newer browsers. Internet Explorer 8 has moved from release candidate to final release, and Chrome 2 is now available as a beta rather than a "might work, might not" developer release. Both browsers promise to be faster than before, but are they fast enough to unseat Safari - or useful enough to fight Firefox? There is, of course, only one way to find out.

Interface
Winner: Chrome
Full screen browsing makes Chrome nicer and more useful on netbooks - and leaves Safari as the only browser without a full screen mode - but like Safari it isn't skinnable: if you don't like the look, tough luck. We're still not sold on Safari's iTunes-style approach to favourite sites, bookmarks and browsing history, and we still don't like IE's interface. This is entirely personal preference, but we're going to give Chrome the gold star here - although while we love the clean design, we appreciate that many of you don't.

Features
Winner: Firefox
Firefox's ecosystem of add-ons gives it first place here: no other browser is as easily or as amazingly extensible. IE has a few extensions together with web slices and accelerators, but it isn't a patch on Firefox - although it's still much more expandable than Chrome or Safari.
Safari and Chrome are all about form following function, but the latest beta of Chrome boasts some useful improvements that make it a bit less bare bones than before. Page zoom is silky smooth and now increases or decreases everything, not just text, and you now get form auto-filling as well as the previous version's form field resizing. Chrome still doesn't do RSS, although that's on the to-do list, and extensions are still some way off.

Fighting evil
Winner: Everyone but Safari
All of the browsers offer pop-up blocking but not ad blocking: for that you'll need to install add-ons or ad-blocking proxies. They also offer variations on the Porn Mode theme so your movements aren't stored on your PC (although, of course, they don't do anything to stop The Man from spying on you), and they promise to protect you from phishing and other net nasties.

The private browsing is implemented in nifty but different ways in Firefox, IE8 and Chrome: when you switch to private browsing in Firefox, it offers to save your currently open tabs so you can return to them when you've finished browsing in secret. With Chrome and IE8 you can run one window (and associated tabs) in normal mode and another window with privacy enabled, but Safari's privacy is global.

The other evil to consider is crashing. IE8 and Chrome both use separate processes for each open tab, which means you can kill misbehaving sites or applications from Task Manager, and Chrome also gives you a tab manager (Shift + Esc) so you can see what process is handling which page or application. The other browsers are all single-process jobs, so if something crashes it takes the browser with it. Firefox's extensions more than compensate for that, though, so we're calling this one a tie between everything but Safari.