Browser battle royale: Which should you use?

Chrome has some nice features, like the Omnibox search and automatic browser updating. Its introduction last year shook up the competition in a good way. But it has two things strongly against it. It’s currently only available for Windows, and Google tends to play fast and lose with privacy. The privacy policy on Chrome states “some Google Chrome features send limited additional information to Google.” You’ll like the performance, but use with caution. For more, check out our full review.

Opera 9.64

Opera doesn’t try to be all things to all people. And the folks who use it, LOVE it. It’s very fast, frequently coming out on top in speed tests, and has won numerous other awards. Techies love it because of its simplicity, which just gets you to where you need to go as fast as possible. It also works really well with the distribution protocol BitTorrent, which means you don’t have to open a new application to download files.

But for me, Opera is a bit too simple. I like the multitude of features that you get with Firefox or Chrome. Yes, it takes up more space on my computer and slows things down, but it also allows me to do more of what I want to do. But I highly recommend Opera if you’re using a notebook computer or a laptop with limited memory.

Microsoft IE 8

It’s not that IE is a bad browser. It’s pretty decent, if a bit slow and clunky. It’s just that IE had a troubling history. It was horrible on security, for instance, a problem that plagued almost all Microsoft products. Its Mac version stunk up the joint.

But IE has made some real improvements. Security is much improved. The parental control features can be customized for each person in the family. And inPrivate browsing allows you to surf without adding those sites to your browsing history, which raises some interesting questions about why you don’t want to leave a browsing history.

Safari 4

I’m not a Mac user (yes, I know, there are PC versions) but Safari is really aimed at Mac users. So I asked my wife, who is, as you may remember, a Mac snob – not that there’s anything wrong with that.

“It’s fast, and almost never hangs up [i.e. crashed],” was her quick response. But then she admitted that she used FireFox almost as often, frequently having both open at the same time. Which, I suspect, is what many Safari users do.

I’ve used Safari and it’s not bad. But its performance and features just do not match Firefox, Chrome, or IE. Monitor bloggers Matt Shaer and Andrew Heining wrote about Safari here and here.

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