We don’t doubt Avant’s appeal early in its life, when it first melded Opera’s innovative tabbed browsing to the industry-accepted IE engine. Given that Internet Explorer 8 only scores 20/100 in the Acid3 test, we weren’t surprised to see Avant do the same, but its mid-table score of 6,489ms in SunSpider – and respectable 16MB memory usage – was actually better than we expected. Resizing or dragging windows caused stuttering redraws, and while it was fine with Flash-heavy sites and HD video on iPlayer and YouTube, Google Docs brought its Avant tab to a complete freeze every time we tried to use it. Performance was shaky during our tests under Windows 7. There’s an ad-blocker built-in, and a full-screen mode that removes the toolbars for use on smaller displays. That mouse hand can control tabs with 16 gestures enabled by holding the right mouse button we disabled them after accidentally closing eight tabs with a distracted twitch. Other than that, the most interesting touches we could find – and it was tough – were a button to close all but the current tab and another to automatically scroll a window while you read, presumably to rest your poor mouse hand. Rather than simply dragging the tab to its destination, it’s all done with right-clicks and menus so it’s not exactly smooth, but it’s a nice way to compare websites. It’s evident that Opera was the main early influence, with Avant offering the ability to undock tabs and tile or arrange them within the overall browser window. Unfortunately, in the three-and-a-half years and close to 50 minor updates since, it’s received zero new features. In some ways it was ahead of its time, introducing an online account for your bookmarks – something Google has only recently added to Chrome – as well as an RSS reader and an auto-fill function. The interface isn’t a retro design choice, though: the reason it looks so old is that the last major release was Avant Browser 11, way back in September 2006.
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