With Firefox 3.5 now finished and available for download, Microsoft used the occasion to tout the speed of Internet Explorer 8. Whereas previously Microsoft focused on page load times, the company today made the case that IE8's "Accelerators" make it faster to use.

Accelerators let Web users highlight text on a page and right-click to bring up a menu to automatically insert and use that text on other sites, rather than cutting and pasting. Microsoft offered up a video showing how Accelerators speed up simple tasks, but it made a point of noting that "all tests were performed using the default installation settings for each browser. No additional add-ons or extensions were added."

Why is that important? Well, it just so happens that an easily installed Firefox add-on called KallOut offers similar functionality.

It would be much more interesting to see a true head-to-head challenge, pitting IE8 vs. Firefox with the KallOut add-on installed, to see how many steps each requires for basic tasks.

For example, one common use is to highlight an address on a page and insert the text into an online mapping service, without cutting and pasting. In our casual use of the KallOut feature for that purpose, the add-on seemed to rival IE8 Accelerators in terms of speeding up the process. But we haven't yet had a chance to conduct extensive testing, so we'll be interested to hear what people say based on their own experiences with each browser.

Even if there are subtle differences, the situation raises, yet again, the question of whether browser users should get those kinds of extra features out of the box or add them on by choice. It often comes down to the personal preference of the individual user. Many tech-savvy PC users prefer the add-on approach, but casual PC users often want their software to have as many capabilities as possible by default. 

Should be interesting to see which approach prevails in the long run.