A highly important decision among computer owners these days is a choice of internet browser. While most people don’t think of this, due to Windows being packaged with Internet Explorer, it is useful to know the options available to you and the pros and cons of each. Most people have no intentions of using something else, because they just assume Internet Explorer is ‘just fine’ and has no issues whatsoever. Microsoft knowingly facilitates this in order to maintain market share.
There are 4 major internet browsers a user has an option to pick from:
1. Mozilla Firefox
2. Apple’s Safari
3. Internet Explorer
4. Opera
Personally, I use Mozilla Firefox 2 (version 3, beta 5 at home) for work and play. Despite its memory usage, I consider it the best, most secure browser around. Version 3 will be released in June for public use (right now beta is available for developers and testers), and it has huge improvements in its memory use, loading speed, and page rendering. It also has literally thousands of add-ons and themes to customize Firefox, some of which I could not live without. Mozilla offers their browser for free as well as an email client called Thunderbird which supports POP3 and IMAP (in case you want to replace Outlook Express, too).
Closely behind that, I have used Opera. It doesn’t have the add on support as much as Firefox does, so I don’t tend to use it too often. It is also extremely strict on security, phishing, and spyware filtering, just like Firefox. It’s fetching and caching methods offer lightening speed browsing on broadband or higher connections, and is nearly ACID2 compliant (most websites will render correctly in Opera). Beyond that, its pretty safe to say that if you put Opera on your PC, there is less risk that a family member could find trouble on the internet (as opposed to using Internet Explorer).
I have used Apple’s Safari for Windows, and despite what articles are saying, its pretty poor. Just the fact alone that it doesn’t have any malware/spyware/phishing filters and the browser doesn’t allow third-party themes or add-ons, I wouldn’t use this browser until this is addressed. Safari also doesn’t support extended validation (EV) certificates either; EV certificates provide better site identification than the regular certificates that encrypted sites use. This caused the CEO of Paypal to tell all of its customers to not use Safari when doing transactions and conducting business, which is a pretty big black eye for Apple in my book. These features should be standard in any browser, the other 3 have them, why not you Safari?
PC World goes more into depth on this subject, and while PC World tends to be a little elementary in its write-ups and articles, I think this one is pretty informative for the average joe.
Updated Web Browsers: Which One Works Best?
While my profession will require me to use Internet Explorer, I can’t express my distaste for it enough. Beyond simple surfing, thats about all its good for. Even with version 8 looming at the end of the year, its nothing more than what Firefox was 4 years ago, or Opera 6 years ago. It just simply does not cut it. It still has major CSS rendering issues, javascript incompatibilities, pseudo PNG support and other f your day up type problems. While I consider myself an IE6/7 web developer expert at this point, we shouldn’t be at the mercy of Microsoft to jump through hoops for their half assed browser. Too late now I suppose.
Try Mozilla Firefox or Opera, you will be glad you did.
