Which is the best browser out there? Here are some of our opinions and thoughts…

Adam: Mozila Firefox

My preferred browser is Mozilla Firefox, although I admit I haven’t had much experience with Opera or Chrome.

Internet Explorer, in my opinion, is the worst of the lot. In my experience, it has been the slowest in terms of the time web pages take to load. It has also been the most pop-up prone and the user interface is exceptionally poor – for example the way the new versions have the menu bar hidden by default and how even simple tasks like changing your homepage have been made as confusing as possible. And you can forget about features like searching your history, which I would have thought were pretty much standard by now.

Safari, Apple’s own browser which they have recently released for Windows, is definitely the best looking of them (as you might expect if you’re familiar with Apple products), however porting Apple’s “Aqua” visual style to Windows has, as we have seen with iTunes, come at the cost of taking up a completely ridiculous amount of memory while running. However, having said this, if you have the RAM, it is definitely a usable alternative to IE. The UI is beautifully designed and works as well as it looks, however there is limited support for plug-ins additional to the Flash, Java and QuickTime it comes with.

Mozilla Firefox, I feel, is good browser which, although it takes a pretty long time to start up on my PC, runs quickly and smoothly on every OS I’ve used and loads pages faster than IE most of the time. Its best feature, in my opinion, is the huge library of extensions available to download for free from the Firefox website. Extensions are little add-ons which, yes, extend the browser in some way. For example, “Google Preview” gives you a thumbnail image of each site next to your search results. “Resizer” lets you resize text boxes on web pages, and InterClue can be used to find out whether a link is worth clicking or not by popping up a little window with a summary of the page’s contents. If you’re that kind of person, there is also a similarly varied library of themes which can completely change the appearance of the browser, including everything up to the window’s border and titlebar (which is decided by your operating system). And if what you find in the libraries isn’t enough, there is a tutorial on the website which demonstrates how to make your own Firefox extensions and themes. It is this almost unlimited extra functionality that in my opinion sets Firefox apart from other browsers.

My favourite:

AJ: Undecided – Can I design my Own?

I currently use Opera on my Desktop at work, Google Chrome on my Laptop, and Firefox (from Mozilla) on my Media Centre at home, they all have plus points, and unfortunately negative ones. Internet Explorer has the burden of being the “brand leader” and this means it is subject to the most virus and malware attacks making it the least “safe” browser to use. I find however it views websites better than the others (webdesigners will check what their site looks like in IE, but not necessarily in the rest), I find fonts frequently look different and inevitably worse in Firefox, than IE.

Opera: I like the speed dial feature, where you can have a page that views mini pages of your top nine sites, for some weird reason Google’s version of this selects your “most visited” sites (so if you have a problem with say Microsoft and have to keep visiting them they feature in your “favourite” page), how annoying and Big Brother Tendency is this?