With a wealth of browsers to pick from, it’s getting harder and harder to decide which one is best suited to your particular browsing experience. You get the popular stereotypes – Internet Explorer is for technophobes, Google Chrome for the ‘geek chic’, Mozilla Firefox for those too stubborn to accept Chrome’s so-called superiority; and Safari for the Apple ‘snobs’. We’ve researched these four ‘top dog’ browsers and have compared their common features to see where their strengths (and weaknesses) lie.
Internet Explorer
Best for: Security. With features like ‘Do Not Track’ and ‘Use Tracking Protection’, IE can put a stop (or at least control) to the websites you visit collecting sensitive data about you. You can also browse ‘InPrivate’, which eliminates passwords, search history, webpage history, and any other information you put in once you close IE. The SmartScreen feature also helps protect you by detecting any potentially harmful websites.
Worst for: Personalisation. IE 10 lacks the option to change themes, and whilst its personal appearance has improved over earlier versions, it still has a lot of catching up to do.
Google Chrome
Best for: Plug-ins, personalisation and stability. Chrome offers a seemingly endless range of extensions and apps to enhance your browsing experience, as well as a sign-in option that gives you the option of accessing your favourite pages on different computers. Chrome also runs different tabs as separate processes, which means if one tab crashes, the other pages are not affected. HTML 5 also runs superbly on Chrome.
Worst for: No integrated RSS reader, which means you cannot get all the feeds you subscribe to in one fluid page.
Mozilla Firefox
Best for: Add-ons. Whilst Chrome is catching up fast, Firefox has always dominated this field, with a range of plug-ins that continue to impress.
Worst for: Stability. Too many add-ons slow Firefox down significantly, causing crashes on an oft-regular basis.
Apple Safari
Best for: Mobile syncing. If you own an Apple device, Safari definitely is the one to go to (no surprise here). Safari also has always offered a very secure browsing experience, guaranteeing that websites bearing malicious code will never get into your computer system.
Worst for: Speed. Speed has always been an issue for Safari, which places poorly in terms of loading graphics-heavy pages. It is also lagging as far as HTML 5 goes.
