Browser Shootout, which is best?

Browser Shootout, which is best?

The great thing about web browsers is they are all free and in reality you can load as many as you want on whatever operating system you choose. Recently though we had Internet Explorer V9 released to the world, we had Firefox V4 RC and finally Chrome is at Version 10 I think. You can scour the web and find benchmarks and these shows (Depending on which site they used to test them) that is the best. I want to explore this from my own personal view point, both in a work situation and at home and show that indeed, there is not one clear winner.

At work

Having tried all of them at work, the one that works best there is in fact internet explorer. The reason why this pans out is pretty simple – the web developers and companies that write front end have to target something and as Internet explorer is installed on every single work machine, why not aim at that slice of the market and of course use Silverlight for the fancy bells and whistles. Firefox works just as good I may add to a degree but Chrome starts to fall down badly here and let us not forget that we will make sure people cannot go around installing whatever they want on a company machine.

At Home

The majority of the sites that I visit at home feature two things here, one been Adobe Flash (Streaming sites, YouTube and such) and Adverts. Now I do not mind the odd advert on a page but when it starts coming up in front of what your doing, then it is time to kill it off. Chrome tries ever so hard to get rid of adverts but it fails, the only good thing about chrome is it is fast to load. IE9 looks and moves fast now but it still retains no adblocker and when I click a link I do not want to open a new browser.

The Bottom line here then after trying various browsers at home is I stick with Firefox 4 RC, which is still fast, just a bit slow to load but has the ability for me to skin it to my taste, add in various plug-ins to make it do what I want to do and of course not crash.

Talking of crashing

The only time I have seen a browser crash of sorts was Google chrome which told me flash had crashed and I had to restart the whole thing anyhow. People seem to worry that one tab crashed will kill the whole browser but I have nothing on my tab’s that cannot be reloaded without issues anyhow – so who care?

Bottom Line

As I said at the start, try them all on the sites you go on and not this 5 minutes, load up a few sites, say that its crap and revert – no. Use the browser for one Week, do what your normally do and choose the one which YOU like, do not worry if your friend says its crap, what do they know right?