The latest versions of IE and Chrome are neck-and-neck in performance, ease of use, security and privacy options.
I don’t think the choice matters to the vast majority of Web surfers, except from an ideological standpoint. So which browser really is best, and should you switch? In the USA, though, Chrome takes second place with just 23% to IE's 42%. The choices are close enough that this could be fair if you really care about your interface.Chrome Inches into First Place in Browser WarsĪccording to this chart of browser market share, Google's Chrome browser is the most popular in the world, in use by 34% of all users. Some users may want to choose based on the location of the buttons. Others may have a favorite plug-in they can't live without. Sophisticated users, including developers, may want a browser that supports the latest standards, while casual users may want to avoid the cutting edge for simplicity and stability. All are perfectly good choices, but one may be slightly better for certain users than others. The poor browser has to try to keep them all ready in case someone wants to see any of those tabs immediately.Ĭhoosing among Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari is not simple. Some users may blame the browser when they have 80-odd tabs opened to pages that are issuing AJAX calls left and right. Often, the bloat isn't the fault of the browsers themselves, but the Web designers who lard up the site with endless AJAX calls and slick morphing features. For more detail, and caveats, see the sidebar, " Battle of the Web browsers: HTML5 and memory tests." And in HTML5 compatibility tests, Safari led the way. In my memory consumption tests, Firefox proved leanest. In my SunSpider JavaScript benchmark tests, Opera and Chrome were fastest. You can have small or you can have fast, but you can't have both.
In many cases there's a trade-off because the programmers gain speed by filling up the memory and precomputing and precompiling every part of the Web page. Others want their browsers to respond immediately. Some people complain when their browsers suck up every spare byte of memory. The control of the living room screen is worth billions of dollars, and the success or failure of the browser's video delivery mechanism will determine who may or may not have control over that shimmering rectangle and the zombie eyes glued to it.Ĭhoosing a Web browser is made even harder because solid numbers are often preludes to debate. And Flash is just the beginning - all of the browsers are rolling out various combinations of new features, but developers can't begin to use them until there's a stable platform with wide enough adoption. Careers of Flash developers and the fate of projects they build will rise and fall on these issues. You may or may not like Adobe Flash, but the support or lack of support is important for all of us.
The technical details can also be a bit personal and political, but they have bigger implications for developers and consumers everywhere. There's not much point debating these issues. These are intensely personal decisions, and the look and feel can often be changed with add-ons. It may be impossible to be rational about many of the cosmetic issues, like the placement of buttons or the location of the tabs. While you may not care if someone moves a button from the left to the right, other users do - and the discussion forums are filled with debate. Yes, some of the so-called innovations are trivial, but if you're going so spend all day with a piece of software, it makes sense to be picky. On the other hand, there's a lot of competition, and some very smart people are working hard to produce very clever new innovations. Many websites look the same in all of the major browsers, a testament to the hard work of the developers and their desire to get their information out to the largest audience. Most differences can be smoothed over when the Web designers use cross-platform libraries like jQuery. The core standards are pretty solid and the job of rendering the document is well understood. On one hand, the programs are as close to commodities as there are in the computer industry. The Web browser handles all of that and more.Ĭhoosing a best browser is an impossible job. Do you want to announce your engagement? There's a website for that too. Did you miss a television show? There's a website for that. Do you have documents to edit? There's a website for that. Now the challenges are greater because the browser is becoming the home for almost everything we do. If a tag like comes along, change the font. Not too long ago the job of a Web browser was simple: Get the text from the Internet and pour it into the window.
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