Best Web Browsers

Microsoft Internet Explorer comes with most (if not all) new Windows computers, (although it's not available in versions for Mac or Linux) and it's undergone a lot of changes over the years with a lot of hiccups along the way. It became an unpopular choice for a while, as the browser war raged on, but is now in it's Ninth incarnation and is better than ever

Features.
IE has caught up with the leading browsers and now includes a download manager, tabbed browsing and a url and search box called "One Box", similar to Chrome's Omnibox. Best of all, internet explorer 9 has a long list of preference settings so that you can use other services than the windows defaults: MSN, Bing and Windows Live. Stability is the watch-word at Microsoft these days, so IE9 has been upgraded with new upgraded methods for handling javascript. That means crashes are unlikely and when they do occur, a sandbox feature prevents the crash from taking down rest of your tabs. Internet Explorer also includes support for html5 and associated graphics, the latter being shunted to the user's graphics card to improve rendering speed.

Security
Some security features included with IE range from an ActiveX filter that blocks ActiveX until the user manually enables it for each module, the automatic population of a "bad Site" list which also protects the computer from tracking devices utilizing javascript and pixel images. All this protects your pc and keeps your data safe.

Firefox is a well established brand in the browser game, appearing around the time of IE and Netscape (nicknamed Nutscrape by many, it was purchased by AOL in the mid 2000's but is no longer being updated and has only a limited community support base) and successfully competing with both. Firefox has a large community that provides support to it's users, and volunteer developers that write many of the extensions provided for the browser. Recently (after months of extensive beta testing), Mozilla Firefox 4 has finally been released with lots of upgrades and new features.

Features
Firefox is one of the most powerful browsers with many possibilities for extension. However this come at a price - Firefox can become quite the resource-hog if extensions are not managed properly, and this has unfortunately not changed much with their new release, despite upgrades to their "Jagermonkey" Javascript engine. Conversely, extensions and plugins are now separated from the main program so that if crashes do occur, it will not disrupt your browsing experience too badly.

Smaller features include "paste and search" and Paste and Go" for the address bar, a concept similar to the omnibox in both Google Chrome and IE, Organised tabbed browsing allows you to "favourite" tabs, and pin others to the taskbar, and store tabs in more manageable groups, which can be edited and stored for later. Unfortunately Firefox still only supports manual upgrading via the About menu. Similar to IE9, Firefox utilizes the Graphics card to process images to make page load faster and has integrated HTML5, CSS3, WebGL and 2d support.

Security
Firefox have incorporated the new trend for "secret browsing" by adding a "Do Not Track" option to make the browser effectively forget that the site ever existed. Also included is an option to block websites from installing tracking cookies, "HTTP Strict Transport Security" which protects your login data as it wings it's way across the internet, and "Instant WebSite ID" which gives the user data on the website they are surfing. Of course, given the nature of Firefox, the user can also extend their browser's capabilities by installing extra security features and tweaking it's set of security options.

Opera used to be my favourite browser, until I started using Chrome. I loved it because of it's feature-rich interface, stability and speed. The only thing that put me off in those days was that the free version had paid ads running across the top of the screen. The bought version did not, and so I switched browsers. Now though Opera is completely free and still retains all that made it great, and more!

Features
Uniquely to Opera are "mouse Gestures". Most basic operations can be executed by a mouse movement listed on the right click menu. This means no more hunting through menus or remembering keyboard shortcuts!
Opera was one of the first browsers to feature tabbed browsing, and is still a pioneer in this area. It now features stacked tabs - dragging tabs onto one another creates stacks that show a thumbnail preview on mouse-over. Again, Opera is the only browser that currently does this. Closed tabs are sent to the bin, which makes re-opening tabs a lot easier and more accessible.
Opera have also come into line with certain other browsers like Chrome and Firefox by introducing browser extensions, in addition to their "widgets". And if that isn't enough, here's a list of some other things available to you as an opera user:

• An enhanced E-Mail Panel


• Newsgroup Support


• Password and Download manager


• Opera Unite (A kind of social content-sharing thing)


• Search Engine Customization


• Quick-find (searches history for a text string typed into the address bar)


• Page Zooming


• Spellchecker with over 51 languages

Sadly, Opera only has a small community of volunteers, which is the only drawback to such an amazing, feature-rich peice of free software.

Security
Opera doesn't have the complicated automatic safety features built into most other browsers, but still comes with a few safeguards. However with the new addition of extension, the few features it does have will no doubt be gradually augmented.
When a user visits a site in opera, the browser automatically colour-codes it's safety level as either: Web, Secure, Trusted and Turbo. This is intended to help the user decide whether it is safe to part with confidential details, passwords and so on. Opera also features a customizable pop-up blocker, designed to allow pop-ups only from sites you allow. Plugins are also easily switched on and off should you need to increase either security or speed.

Apple's Safari, which is the Mac's original and leading browser, is back with a new edition - Safari 5. Now also including versions for Windows and iPhone, Safari has shipped with some cool new additions.

Features
Safari is a very visual browser - more so than any of the others, and if you've ever used iTunes, you'll recognise the look. It achieves this via graphics hardware acceleration (like some of the other browsers reviewed here), and things are speeded up in general by their ground-breaking new Nitro Javascript Engine. Similar to chrome, Safari shows it's most recently viewed sites as a slideshow on the homepage, but better than chrome it does it in 3D! Pageload has been speeded up by improvements with page caching and DNS pre-lookup. For speed this rivals Google Chrome. Safari doesn't feature a two-in-one search and address bar (the two feature side-by-side instead) like the other browsers, but the search bar is customizable to use your preferred service. Sadly Safari has limited support for extensions, which are turned off by default. Uniquely, Safari has a "Reader" feature which strips out the clutter from a webpage - all the advertisements, movies, javascript and so on - to create a text-only environment so you can find the information you wanted fast. Safari supports the new HTML5 protocol.

Security
Safari is much like Opera in that it only has limited security features. It provides the user with Pop-up blocking which is again customizable depending on the site you are on. It also provides the user with Private browsing, which removes all trace of your browsing session from your browser's history and cookies list. The few extensions that Safari supports are Sandboxed, meaning that any errors or malicious code is dealt with internally and is less likely to affect the system as a whole.

This has to be my favourite browser of all. Chrome is a relative newcomer to the browser scene, but has built for itself a solid reputation for being fast, stable and intuitively streamlined. Now also in it's ninth incarnation it just got even better.

Features.
Google have increasingly become more and more interested in "Cloud Computing" and this forms the bedrock upon which it's new toy, the ChromeBook is based. An offshoot of this concept added to the Chrome browser is "Cloud Printing" which allows you to print to a printer connected to any pc in the cloud. WebGL has now found support within Chrome, which uses WebGL to access it's web store - THE place on the internet to find applications, extensions and themes to further enhance your Chrome experience. In an attempt to make the browser even faster, the people at Google went one step further - the browser now attempts to read your mind (no, seriously!)! As you type a url into the Omnibox, chrome guesses the site you intend to visit and preloads it for you, for your instant viewing. Chrome is at the bleeding edge of HTML5 technology, no other browser beats it for compatibility.
Chrome has all the other feautres of the major browsers - tabbed browsing and the "omnibox" (the place for searching and URLs) but the beauty of the software is that because of it's endless extendability you can add even more features to it, depending on your requirements.

Security
Chrome has both an automatic and manual approach to security. Automatically it will block poppups and harmful sites, but for the user it provides information on the connection and the website visited by a single click of the "world" button next to the Omnibox. Privacy settings are easily manipulated to suit the requirements of almost everybody to provide a truely unique browsing experience.

IE

Firefox

Opera

Safari

Chrome

Speed

3

3

4

5

5

Stability

5

4

4

5

5

Extendability

0

5

3

1

5

Security

4

5

3

2

5

IE

Firefox

Opera

Safari

Chrome

Windows

yes

yes

yes

yes

yes

Linux

no

yes

yes

no

yes

Mac

no

yes

yes

yes

yes