Since the turn of the millennium, a heated battle has been taking place to maintain dominance over the internet. For quite awhile Internet Explorer (IE) was undoubtedly crushing all competition, but as the years rolled on to the present day, adamant competition arose in the forms of Mozilla Firefox, Safari and Google Chrome. The battle has been reignited and so the question remains: which browser is best?
Which Browser is Best – The Pro’s and Con’s of Each Competitor
- Google Chrome- Google Chrome is definitely the newcomer to the scene, and yet in its short time in the battle, it has taken a strong stand. Over the last couple of years it has taken the lead due to its sleek and user-friendly design, a hybrid search-address bar and the minimalistic tab setup. It helps that it is compatible across most computer systems. It is high compatibility with HTML5 and a fast V8 JavaScript engine give it an edge in the battle. However, it does lack in HTML5 bitmapping and vectoring, making the browser far from perfect.
- Internet Explorer- The veteran of the war, having already taken out Netscape about a decade ago, IE has a history of success, but with a changing browser landscape, it still has much to prove. Like Chrome, IE has made its design much sleeker with one click bookmarking and a cleaner tab set up next to the search-address bar. This changes have resulted in significantly improvements and users have certainly expressed appreciation for the transformation. It also is very fast overall, especially with bitmapping. Perhaps its “Achilles’ Heel,” however, is that it can only be used on Windows units and not Linux or Macs.
- Mozilla Firefox- As IE’s first among recent competitors, Firefox has been adamant about establishing its hold on internet users. Like Chrome, it can be used over most systems and has an incredibly fast V8 suite. It does very well in overall usage testing and while not being the absolute best in in any one category, it does tend to do many things well in general. Its design has been improving over its updated versions, but it is still the only browser not to hybridize its search and address bars, thus making it a little more clunky and not as user-friendly.
- Safari- Mac’s contribution to the battle, Safari is very close to the others in performance. Its design has gone the route of Chrome with address-search bar underneath the tabs, giving it a little more space and room to work with. It remains on par with the other browsers speed-wise, but it is limited in that only Macs can run it.
So, which browser is best? They all run at about the same speed, although overall Chrome is a bit faster. As far as design goes, that will generally fall under your personal preferences. First IE had the edge, then Chrome in the last few years, but even now the playing field is close to even. So the battle will continues on…maybe new players will even join the scene in the coming years!
