WARNING: Massive wall of text.

It’s about time that I got up and did part 2 of the browser wars right? I’m going to skip the small talk and get to the point. Please note that anything opinionated I say are strictly opinions based on my own experience. Part 3 will be covering the more obscure browsers that not as many people know about.

Let’s start with Apple Safari. While it seems to be okay on Mac OSX, Safari falls flat on its face for Windows. No special features aside from RSS. Dated interface included as well. Only cool thing is the flashy speed dial. A huge problem with Safari is the multiple vulnerabilities that the Windows version possesses. It has local and remote exploits, heat and buffer overflow, if you open up a tab sometimes it parses incorrectly due to faulty coding, multiple errors when handling FTP info, which allows for multiple XSS and XSRF vulnerabilities. For more information about the security issues of Safari, please comment below addressing ‘Viral Dragon’ as he is the guy who specializes in internet security. I will give it points for being fairly fast, though not the fastest by any means. RAM usage doesn’t seem to be terrible either, but other than that, I say Safari is a no-go.

Sadly, alot of people still use Internet Exploder. Oh, whoops! I mean Explorer. But anyway, people seem to use it simply because it comes with their operating system, and they don’t have to worry about spending 5 minutes to download and install another browser. While Internet Explorer has improvements with version 8, it is still not the best choice in the world whatsoever, especially when the updates to the browser itself is limited by the OS. Windows 2000 (some people still use it) will not upgrade to version 6. Windows XP will not upgrade to version 8 (I’m not sure about version 7 though; haven’t tried). Yes, it’s convenient because it comes with Windows operating systems, but that’s where the fun ends. Internet Explorer is notorious for having tons of security vulnerabilities, lack of updates, slow load times, a very crappy and dated interface, no flexibility as far as features go, and it’s just not that great of an experience. IE has always been steps behind of the pack, and it’s no different today. It still has the same problems its always had, though it does support add-ons and tabbed browsing now. The add-ons are provided by mostly Microsoft, and alot of them are things that I’d never use, such as “blog with Windows Live”. Microsoft tries to be a jack of all trades often as we know, but in my eyes, they fail. Why? Because their products are just tools to advertise other products. Google’s shear quality in alot of their services also overshadows them, especially with their popular Blogger service. Internet Explorer does work, and we still need it about 1% of the time for websites that may have compatibility problems, but it’s definitely not a very good browsing experience.

Mozilla Firefox is known for creating pretty much a revolution for internet browsers. It is still widely popular today, obviously, and with good reason. Firefox used to be the fastest browser available, and it was also the first (that I know of) to incorporate skins and plugins for browsers. These plugins can range from very useful, to the point where nobody wants to live without it, to completely useless and stupid. Firefox has gotten faster with each release, as it should, but it still takes quite a bit of resources at times. It’s definitely not the most stable browser in the world as it will occasionally crash or have memory leaks, but it’s not a deal breaker. Some people still like it, but personally, the interface seems a bit dated to me compared to alot of the other browsers, and alot of the plugins are now on other browsers without requiring any additional downloading. There is alot of respect for Firefox out there, and it will most likely continue for a good while longer because it simply works for alot of people, and it’s what they’re used to, but I’d like to see an overhaul. There’s nothing that FF can do that other browsers can’t now, and it’s also definitely not the fastest or the most stable anymore. This browser is legendary among internet users, but sadly surpassed by more modern browsers. Considering all that said, Firefox is still not a horrible choice at all, as it’s one of the better browsers out there.

Opera 10.5 is great, but it can definitely be a resource hog over time. The more tabs open, the more RAM will be taken up. That’s a given, but the problem here is that when you first open Opera and go to maybe one site, it will probably take around 50 megs of RAM. Open a bunch of tabs, and it rise to around 170 megs, and after closing the tabs, the RAM usage will not go back down, even after clearing cache and tabs. If too many resources are being taken up by Opera, eventually the user will have to restart the browser, and that’s annoying. Having that said though, I haven’t actually had to restart the browser yet, and it still seems to be very stable and a few people I know, including myself have had no major issues with it so far, but it’s something worth mentioning. The resource usage is about the same as what Google Chrome has, and Chrome is possibly the most stable browser available right now. Version 10.10 of Opera didn’t have this resource problem as much though. The interface is quite nice because there is very little that gets in the way at all. Some will compare it to Google Chrome’s minimalistic design, though Opera is more feature rich. The standard menu bar at the top that was in the previous versions is now gone, and now replaced with the entire menu being condensed in a single button. There is still a Google search bar on the right of the address bar which is kind of pointless, because putting in a keyword on the address bar will automatically search. There is also a customizable speed dial, which is in my opinion the best way to have bookmarks ever, Opera Unite which lets you do many things with your friends who also use the browser, such as private file sharing, or just file browsing, an inbuilt messenger, a “fridge” to post notes to your friends with, inbuilt media player, and also an email checker. This is a great tool for those who want an all in one browser that do not wish to have to deal with putting up with downloading plugins, as all the plugins that are needed are already there from the start. Opera Dragonfly is a brand new feature exclusive to 10.5 which may be ideal for developers, as it shows the page source code and such, but not much more beyond that. Lastly, there is Opera Turbo, which will speed things up if your internet is slow by compressing images that are being loaded. Oh, and did I mention that Opera 10.5 is now the world’s fastest internet browser? One final thing worth mentioning is that users also can take the progress bar at the bottom of the browser off of the bottom, and fuse it with the address bar. This will open up even more viewing area.

Google Chrome is still a mixed back in terms of popularity. Chrome is pretty much a love or hate browser. Personally, I love it. It’s fast, sleek, has a very simple interface, now supports extensions similar to Firefox, has its own version of a speed dial, though it’s limited by just pinned or often visited sites. Chrome’s version of the speed dial is not very customizable at all, but an extra extension can be downloaded to make it function like the one on Opera. There is a fair selection of themes that are easy to install, though alot of them aren’t very appealing. In addition to that, there are alot of ‘under the hood’ settings. Chrome will render 99.9% of pages perfectly (I’ve only seen maybe one site that didn’t function correctly when using Chrome), incognito window for private browsing, download manager, sync bookmarks to Google accounts. By changing some settings, it’s also possible to make Chrome perform even faster. Looking at the task manager, you will see each tab is actually a separate process. You may be thinking “Wow, resource hog” and to an extent, it can be, but the difference is that the memory management makes this browser possibly the most stable one to date. If a certain page causes the browser to freeze, simply end the process to whatever the tab is without having to restart everything. The big reason why Chrome is so good is simply because it doesn’t really have any technical problems whatsoever, it’s fast, and features a sleek interface. The standard progress, menu, and additional search bars that you see on other browsers are non existent here, making the whole design pretty minimalistic and opens a much bigger viewing area for browsing. These functions are definitely not gone though. They have just been moved. All the menus needed are in the form of a button on the right side, the address bar will also function as a search bar, and the progress bar has also been combined to the address bar.

So guys, out of these major browsers mentioned, which is your favorite? Tell us why. Heck, tell us some horror stories. Maybe discuss something we haven’t covered, who cares! I’m still split between Chrome and Opera. I’d say for now, Chrome is my favorite but only by a very slim margin. There is just nothing about Chrome that I really can complain about. Know that I’m not really a fan of any single browser. There are many browsers that are cool in their own ways. Part 3 will be about the lesser known browsers, such as Maxthon and K-Meleon.

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