Pet peeve time. It’s long past time for tech writers to give up their click bait attempts with articles about which internet browser is BEST. These pop up at least once every week or two on the tech blogs. They are usually a head-to-head comparison to the top four or so: Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Apple Safari, and sometimes Opera or others. Here’s a recent example:
[https://www.pcworld.com/article/3213031/computers/best-web-browsers.html]
Best web browsers of 2017: Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Opera go head-to-head
We take a look at the performance and features of the big four internet browsers to see which one will serve you best in 2017.
Let me just ask, who uses only one browser? I realize there are grandmas and kids and other less techie people in the world who might just use whatever came on their pc or laptop (IE, Edge, Safari…) but most people I work with, and every person who I’ve every helped over the years, use at least two or more browsers at the same time. Yes, there are strengths and weaknesses to every browser (every class of software), but there is no BEST one.
For myself, I gravitate to Firefox because of the extensions and it has a somewhat smaller memory footprint than Chrome. But even to this day, leaving it running for days on end and having multiple tabs open will result in FF sucking down a massive amount of memory. And it gets slower, and slower… and s l o w e r. I found the only way to stop that is by saving my sessions, killing the FF process, and firing it up again… starting the whole cycle again. FF can also get all locked up by a single rogue tab. I know the developers are working on these problems, but as of today (v56) it still has these and other problems.
Chrome is nice but does take up a lot resources, as each tab is a new system process, though this does help by not letting one tab crash all of Chrome. I always feel I have to be more ‘miserly’ with my Chrome tabs than with FF. New versions come out very frequently and I believe that they were the first to get a functional 64 bit version out than FF (sorry, too busy to google that). I keep all my Chrome sessions across all my devices synced to the same account so that extensions stay in sync, and I can keep track of open tabs on all of the different devices.
Edge: ha, who uses Edge? Still no good extensions, still does not work with all sites. No other words necessary.
Safari: Not a Mac guy, but it works very well on the iPad and iPhone. Tightly controlled by Apple, just like everything else. I think once, a very long time ago, I tried it on a Windows PC. Not sure if normal people still use it on PCs. Chrome is a good alternative on iOS.
Opera seems pretty solid, but to be honest, I only use it to log into my Facebook account. Why not connect to FB on FF or Chrome? You must have missed it when it was discovered that FB can track you ALL OVER THE INTERNET from the browser you are using, EVEN AFTER YOU LOGGED OUT. Sorry to get all caps locked on you there, I just can’t believe how bad that speaks to FB and privacy. And it’s not just about using cookies and clicking on the Like buttons. You think FB really ever lets you go?
Ah, but another great browser is Vivaldi! Spunky and still relatively fresh to the scene, it also is pretty solid and reliable. But again, like Opera, I really only use it to stay logged into my personal Gmail account. Using Google products is funny and slightly annoying as they seem to still think, in this grand year of 2017, that people have and use only one Gmail/Google account. 🙂 So, needless to say, I don’t use my main Gmail account (open in Vivaldi) for much else in the Google environment, hence that’s why I don’t use Gmail from FF or Chrome because outside of Incognito mode they only let you have one account logged in at a time. (So yeah, it gets a bit unwieldy when you need to use four or five Google accounts on your computer at one time.. but it’s manageable!)
Just for grins, there was also the standalone portable QtWeb browser back in the day. I just checked their site and the last update was 2013! Guess they just couldn’t compete with the PortableApps group, which are the versions of Chrome and Firefox that I use… highly recommended!