Best Web Browser

So how do you choose the best browser to use when there are so many options out there? Well let’s look at the major candidates in 2009: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Google Chrome and Safari.  All seem to release new versions fairly regularly, all are widely known and used and all are talked about and debated all over the web.

For some, they stick with what they have always used and was always on their PC, so it’s Internet Explorer.  For others, the anti-microsoft bunch, it’s always been Firefox.  Then there are the other crowd that go for Opera, Chrome and Safari.

So hang on you say, there is the answer, IE is most popular, then Firefox, then the other three last, Opera, Chrome and Safari.  This may well be the case in terms of usage and popularity, but you should not base your choice on this. 

Through research and technical knowledge, I have concluded that Google Chrome is the best browser in terms of performance just now, and for me, any browser I use I want it to be as fast as possible to surf the web.  It beats Firefox, IE and all the others in its sheer speed to render pages from the web.  If you want add-on features in your browser though, like the weather on your toolbar, and lots of other gimmicks, that may look cool, but you probably won’t use that often and they will slow down the browser, then choose Firefox, it has hundreds of them.  IE does too, but IE is still catching up with Firefox in terms of functionality and performance. 

Ok, back to Chrome.  It’s tabbed browsing shows your most recently visited sites in thumbnails.  It also has a privacy browsing mode, bookmarks bar for quick access to sites, a clean interface so you can see more of the site you are visiting and is very easy to use and configure.  It is also coded differently to other browsers in that each tab is like its own separate browser instance (not exactly, but trying to put this in easy to understand language).  What I mean is, if you have an issue on a web page in one of your tabs in IE, the page freezes and when you kill that page in task manager, you tend to lose the whole browser instance that was running.  However with Chrome, you will see several chrome instances running, one for each tab, so if one site in one tab crashes, it can handle that, you can close it and continue browsing in your other tabs.

Now for the bad news about Chrome.  It is still fairly new to the scene and so not fully supported by all web sites, particular those that are heavily flash based.  For instance, if you are in to online gaming, you may find your usual game site does not work in Chrome, and you have to use another browser.  That said, most sites are aware of Chrome’s rising popularity and are working to support it, plus the Chrome team are no doubt checking more and more sites for compatibility and doing whatever they can, as let’s face it, they have a massive index of sites to test against at Google.

So, what should I do? In my opinion, and what I do, is to use Chrome for nearly everything, expect when I come across a site that doesn’t support it, then open up Firefox and use that, as it’s the next best thing.

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