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.

How to Setup a Proxy, and When You Should.

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How to Put a Proxy Between You and the 'Net 

Without a Proxy, You're Browsing Naked 

Even if you're not familiar with proxies, you've no doubt stumbled across the term once or twice while setting up a network or Internet connection. Simply put, a proxy is an "intermediary" between your computer and the Internet, a tunnel through which all incoming and outgoing traffic must pass. 

To the rest of the world, a proxy "looks and acts" like an individual server, with it's own IP address and associated details. This provides many advantages, some are useful for personal browsing, and many are highly desirable for connecting a larger personal or business network to the Internet. 

Anonymity is a major factor with proxies.
 

Connecting to the Internet without a proxy might put out more information that you want, up to and including your home location. Many sites and services can be denied or at least limited to you based upon your IP address; this is especially true for site blocking and censorship by ISPs, employers, schools, governments, etc. 

Some people simply want to limit their information out of principle, while others have good reason to keep their activities away from too many prying eyes. These reasons can be as innocuous as needing to see websites whose content is tailored to another region (for example, getting the "homeland" version of a website rather than the "international" version), but there's no doubt that the anonymity can serve much more nefarious purposes as well. 

On the other hand, you can also use proxies to do the blocking and filtering.
 

If you're running a network and you want to blacklist (or whitelist) sites for security and productivity purposes, a proxy is often far more flexible than a firewall or other similar solutions. By implementing controls and filtering, a proxy can be used to limit the connections that can be made from or to anyone "behind" the proxy. 

You can also use a proxy to keep track of the things that people (for example, employees and children) are doing with the Internet connection (for example, spending half the day on Facebook or porn sites). Browsing history and bandwidth usage statistics are among the things that can be recorded using a proxy server. 

Proxies are also useful to increase performance and make data traffic more efficient.
 

Caching is the oldest and most common use for a proxy, storing web pages and resources so that they don't need to be "built" from scratch every time they're accessed. With a single gateway or "reverse proxy", the aforementioned security and filtering benefits can be applied once to a single connection rather than to all of the network's servers, as can SSL and encryption controls. Traffic control allows distributing or "load balancing" incoming connections, in addition to managing the bandwidth priority and DNS details of individual servers and internal networks behind the proxy. 

Options for setting up your proxy

 

There are a few ways to set up a proxy server, and the choice you make depends on your needs, your level of comfort with network tasks, and whether you have some server space available or not. 

Open Yourself Up to Proxies
 

If anonymity is your sole concern, you can start with an "open proxy". These are freely available services that allow you to connect with any browser to an offsite proxy server for anonymous access to websites. Most of the "IP anonymizers" found on the web are open proxies, and they generally get the job done -- not simply for people exercising their right to privacy, but also for spamming and malware distribution. 

This has led government censors, ISPs, email servers, and other to be suspicious of open proxies, and to block or track traffic from anonymous proxies (open or otherwise). Many servers that run open proxies keep logs of incoming IP addresses, and those logs can be seized or made available. Ironically, this means that you could potentially be less "anonymous" on a proxy server than you would have been by connecting directly. 

Another issue commonly reported is the incompatibility of proxies with certain websites. Java is a particular source of issues, but various complex frameworks (especially apps within a site) can make proxies problematic. You may indeed find that some of your most visited sites have reduced functionality, making a proxy less attractive. 

Personal Proxies
 

A slightly more involved route would be to install an application or browser plug-in that establishes a proxy server utilizing a specified IP address and port. This is the usual method for personal home networks, but also perfectly suitable for many business network needs. Some applications automatically change settings or walk you through the process, but it's more likely that you'll need to manually enter the correct LAN IP and DNS settings via the Control Panel. 

The method differs between operating systems and versions. Windows 7 conveniently passes along the necessary settings to any browsers or Internet applications, but there still may be some exceptions that need to be entered manually in the apps themselves. 

One final note on VPNs.
 

If you're looking into proxies, you may also want to consider a VPN (Virtual Private Network) for many of the same benefits and results. VPNs and proxies are not synonymous, but both provide control over IP addresses, with many of the same security, anonymity, and traffic management functions. Bot are also available as free personal software as well as enterprise-level server-based solutions. VPNs also offer additional advantages such as remote access and "thin client" OS booting / emulating options.

About the Author: Porter Olson is a writer and content specialist for UsBundles.

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.

Blogger Buzz: Update on Browser Support

Blogger Buzz: Update on Browser Support