IT Admin

Browsing the Internet.

So how many hours a day do you spend searching the internet? Have you ever looked into the tools available to make browsing the internet faster and more enjoyable? When you think about how many hours a day a person may spend searching the internet it is shocking to see how many people just use the web browser that came on there computer.

What is a Web Browser?

A Web Browser is a computer program or application that allows you the user to interact with text, images, video and any other information typically found on a web page or web site. The Web Browser reads the HTML, JAVA, PHP or whatever language may be used then renders that code into something you can understand. It is in the way a Web Browser renders this code that determines how fast, or how well a web page displays.
Picking a Browser
Before you can pick a browser you need to know which web browser are available. The most well know are Internet Explore, Safari and Mozilla Firefox, but Google’s Chrome is defiantly trying to make a name for itself. A few other less known are Opera, Konqueror, Amaya and Flock. Things like AOL Explorer and MSN Explorer are not true web browsers. They are a graphical front end to Microsoft’s Trident engine and would require another article to explain.

Things to Consider?

Surprisingly with the latest round of updates there isn’t a lot differences as far as features. All major browsers have excellent security features built in.  I have found little information about Google Chrome. Tabbed browsing is also included in all of them. All of them except Google Chrome have a built in RSS reader and Ad blocker. I’m not picking on Google Chrome it is still new in its conceptual stages and should be given some time before a real decision is made about Chrome’s potential. But at this point Chrome does not have all of the standard equipment.

Age of your computer; If you have an older computer you may want to try smaller browsers such as Opera. It doesn’t matter how good a browser is if it slows your computer down. IE 8, Firefox and Chrome use more resources then Opera.

Customizing and exploring, if you are really into customizing your web browser or are very tech savvy you will defiantly want to check out Firefox. Firefox destroys the competition if you are looking for plug-ins or themes to improve your browsing experience. Personally, I couldn’t live without a few of the coder plug-ins for Firefox.

Type of Computers, if you use both Macs and PCs such as myself then you are limited to Firefox or Opera that is if you want to use the same browser on both machines.
Current Failures, does your current browser often stall or crash. It is possible for code on a certain page to cause a browser to crash or stall out. I have noticed that my beloved Firefox hangs up a lot on my Mac Book. Strangely Firefox runs perfectly on my hackintosh. This hang up has me looking into new browsers.

Download Managers, Browsers such as Firefox have superior downloading features such as the ability to pause and resume a download.
Open Source- You may want to consider Firefox and Opera simply because they are open source projects. I often try to support open source, as a way to give back to the community.

Which one is Faster?

The question is a lot harder to answer then I first thought. Truthfully there isn’t a simple answer. It depends on what you are doing and what you are using. Traditionally, Internet Explorer has the fastest start up time, this is because the majority of its resources load on start up. Opera is the fastest as in resources and processes. Opera clearly uses less processing power then any other browser therefore it will run faster on older machines. According to Microsoft Firefox is the fastest at loading webpage’s, but the margin is narrower then the speed at which the human eye blinks (0.02 of second).

In Summery

I recommend Firefox, it does everything you could want, it does it as well if not better then everyone else and the plug-ins available simply cant be matched by other browsers. In reality it seems to be more of a personal preference. A few years ago Firefox dominated the market but Mac and Windows have once again learned from the Open Source community and improved their products. However, I strongly recommend that you constantly upgrade the most current version of any browser. I still find people using IE 6 and often hear that web pages don’t look right. Well, that is simply because the code used to create web pages is ever changing and the older browsers simply don’t understand the newer code.

Downloads

Firefox
IE 8
Safari
Opera
Chrome
Flock
Amaya