Sunday, March 14, 2010

Browser Wars

Hi everybody! Today is March 14, more popularly known as Pi Day! In addition to that, tomorrow is the Ides of March, and Wednesday is "Happy Happy Drink Drink Day"! Wow, that's a busy week!

It happens to be a busy week for me too, as was last week apparently. I might be a bit late with some of the posts next week, but don't worry, I'll do my best to have all of them up.

So I heard that Opera is going to be on the iPhone (the browser, not the genre). I'm going to grab onto this opportunity like Halo with Spartans and compare a few browsers competing in what is dubbed "The Second Browser Wars".

Safari: I only ever used this in my Communications Technology class, and it's not bad. There are some things that you need to get used to, but that's only because the Mac uses the Command button instead of the Control button. Potato, Potahto. I did have some trouble, though, with needing to use the keyboard to right click. Seriously? As a browser, though, Safari does well for itself.

Opera: Again, something I haven't used much, just on the Wii. On the Wii, it's terrible, but that's almost to be expected. Nintendo definitely didn't make the Wii for web browsing. The Wiimote's atrocious. Opera runs a bit slow, but that might also be Nintendo's fault. Jury's out on this one.

Now for the three browsers I have used a lot:

Internet Explorer 8: My first browser. Like everybody else, I started out browsing the internet on IE. It's served nicely in its heyday, and I really never noticed anything wrong with it. Well, except for the toolbars. Seriously, they take up a third of the screen. I checked. However, last summer, IE started crashing on me. It was getting to the point where I was groaning in frustration more than I was browsing. That was only a few months, too, since I had downloaded it. So, IE was dumped.

Mozilla Firefox: I found this to be a bit of an improvement over IE, but not that much. Firefox dumped some of the toolbars, and it ran a tiny bit faster than IE, but it did crash. I never liked crashes, since I would have to get my tabs back.

Google Chrome: A guy at my workplace suggested this to me, just a week after I got Firefox. I've been hooked since then. For one, the web page takes up a lot of the screen, instead of needless toolbars. That extra 20% makes a big difference. Second, Chrome saves all your work, so if you accidentally go back a page after writing a bunch, it's all there for you when you go back. Chrome saves which tabs you closed last, so even if it does crash, I just need to click once for my entire session to go back. And I've never come across a situation when I've needed to do that. Well, except when I'm running a lot of Flash. Get on it, Adobe.

So, out of all these browsers, I definitely recommend Google Chrome the most. Which browser is your favorite, and why?

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