A Quick Guide to Choosing an Internet Browser

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Choosing your Internet browser is an important decision, because it will directly affect your web-surfing experience. Browsers make an impact on how fast websites are downloaded and how you view them on the screen. Your browser keeps your bookmarks for you, and it can store personal data like passwords. Each type of browser has thousands of extensions you can download that offer helpful tools to make your life easier. With broadband internet providing so many options online you want to choose a browser that’s high quality, and everyone will have a different preference depending on their needs. Here are some considerations to help you decide.

Internet Explorer

Windows computers come standard with the Internet Explorer browser, and it is the browser the most people use (often because they do not bother to try or download another). Internet Explorer isn’t the best browser to use, however, because it is prone to catching viruses, and it often runs slowly. There are a lot of customization options to play with, but they are not very intuitive. On the plus side, Internet Explorer does usually work well with Windows. There aren’t as many extensions available as with other browsers, but that is changing as more are developed every day.

Safari

Mac computers come standard with the Safari browser. Most Mac users enjoy the Safari browser, because it works well enough on their computers. Safari is not extremely popular for Windows users, however, because it isn’t as fast or as customizable as others. If you use the Internet for very simple browsing and simple tasks, Safari is a fine choice. If you do a lot on the Internet at once, Safari is often slower than other browsers. There are fewer extensions available for Safari, so it may not be the best choice if you’re looking for a lot of add-ons or extra security features.

Firefox

The Mozilla Firefox browser is increasing in popularity, especially within the web design community. Firefox is also open-source, so there are plenty of extensions, and many add-ons offer extremely helpful tools for web designers and developers. You can customize a lot, and it has the most memory of any browser, meaning it’s very quick and ideal for performing complicated web tasks. Firefox is also very secure, with many security extensions available.

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Chrome

Google’s browser Chrome is very fast and user-friendly. It’s a popular choice, especially for people who use Gmail, Google Docs, and other Google products, because it is easy to integrate everything. It has a very streamlined appearance, and there are many extensions available. Because Google Chrome is open-source, there is a high number of user-generated add-ons to choose from. Google Chrome also gets high marks in security. You generally cannot go wrong with this browser.

All of these broadband internet browsers have fantastic options and many people use multiple browsers for different tasks. Each one has different uses depending on your needs so pick one that's perfect for your most common internet uses. 

Sam Jones, the author, finds broadband incredibly useful but thinks that it could be easier to use many websites and browser features.

Top 3 Web Browsers For Your Mac

The best web browsers from the Mac include the top three most popular on the market. You can choose the Safari browser, the Google Chrome browser, and the Firefox browser.

Safari

This is the default browser that is included on the Mac. Safari has added a new unified search field that allows users to search from the address bar. Previous websites are saved and appear in your address bar when typing a new address or search term. Another feature included with the browser is Tab View. This feature allows you to swipe between tabs and open a web page instantly. You can have iCloud tabs that save your last websites and makes them available on the iPhone or iPad. The browser also saves a web page to a reading list that you are able to view offline. 

Google Chrome

The Google Chrome browser is available for Max OS X 10.5 and later versions. The big selling points of the browser is that is starts up fast, loads web pages fast, and searches fast. Chrome included the use of their Omnicar which is a combination address bar and search bar. This browser was the first to have this feature. The Chrome web store is available for you to add various extensions and themes. When a page is displayed in a different language you will see a translation feature appear. This will give you the option to translate the page into any language. The browser also supports an incognito mode. 

Firefox

This is a full-featured web browser that you can install on your Mac. Many features are included on the browser including pop-up blocking, integrated Google search, tab browsing, and privacy options. Your open web pages are also displayed in tabs that you can easily switch between. You are able to use many add-ons to customize the browser. Websites that you use often can be added to the App Tabs section for easy access and to remove from your tab bar. A scrolling feature is also included to see all the tabs open in the browser. One big benefit of this browser is the ability to restore a crashed browser session. 

Additional Information

You can choose to use one or all of these browsers on your Mac. Download and install the Chrome and the Firefox browsers to see how they compare against each other and Safari. You can then decide if you prefer one browser over another. 

BIO – Dan is a Graphic Designer who Loves to Buy iPhone4 Cases for his Pride and Joy Iphone4S

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Microsoft launched new website to check credibility of browsers

Bringing another innovation to the world of technologies and gadget, Microsoft launched a website on October 11^th, 2011 that cranks out security scores for the number of editions of Internet Explorer which is its own browser and also other browsers built by the rivals of Microsoft, Google and Mozilla. This new website is named yourbrowsermatters.org and it works by running a browser through a checklist of security features and then gives a score that is out of a maximum of 4 points.

It is not surprising that the highest version of Internet Explorer (IE9) has the highest score of 4 out of 4. The previous version of Internet Explorer, IE8, which was launched in 2009, had garnered a score of 3. Chrome 14 of Google, which is the current stable build, which was launched last month, has settled on a second position by getting a score of 2.5 out of 4. Another browser which is a month old, which is Mozilla's Firefox 7, had generated a score of just 2 out of 4. The other two browsers which come amongst the top five most used and popular browsers, Opera Software's Opera and Apple's Safari didn't even garner any score as they weren't considered to be competitive enough by Microsoft. The message displayed for both of these was "We can’t give you a score for your browser".

According to Microsoft, this new website and its scoring exam have the purpose of illustrating the insecurities of the older browsers. As a result it is quite anticipated that IE6, which is a decade old and which Microsoft has been keen to kill, had scored a 0 out of 4. It also exposed a prevalence of different web based threats that will try and trick users into making poor decisions. Microsoft’s chief IE marketing executive, Roger Capriotti, said that the ranking was based on browsers that provide better protection against the most common threats such as malware which are socially engineered.

Microsoft had publicized the ability of IE8 and IE9 for blocking malware for quite some time with studies done by NSS Labs as examples. According to these studies some of which was paid by Microsoft itself, IE9 had the sustained capacity of blocking 99.2% of all the malicious links and Web-hosted malware that it faced. These results displayed by Microsoft haven’t been commented on by Google and Mozilla yet, although Microsoft has welcomed comments from them.