The Best Browser Of Them All?

As I'm sure that you are aware, I use the internet a lot. So my choice of a web browser is kind of a big deal. I want a browser that is fast, reliable, and gives me cookies on a regular basis (technically all of them do that already. You know? Cookies? Yeah? I make myself laugh. Admittedly no one else, but that still has to count for something). No browser is perfect, yet some are certainly better than others. So the purpose of this blog post will be for me to share my own personal opinion, as I have observed from using each browser extensively. Now I won't be focusing on graphs or benchmarks, so if I say something is "fast" that is a completely relative term. After all, it can really depend on what system you are using the browser on. For example, most browsers work better on Windows than they do on Macs. I've also noticed some differences between how Firefox works on Linux compared to how it works on Windows. Thus, without actual figures, whatever I say in regards to things like speed is from my own experiences and might differ from your's. I'll try to cover as many cross-platform things instead.

Firefox

Firefox is probably the browser that I've spent the most time on. I've always appreciated the solid speed and modest memory use.

Tab Management:
One of the most important things for me in a browser is tab management. Sadly, Firefox doesn't handle this particularly well. After you reach a limit of eight tabs the rest disappear off the screen and you have to press an arrow button to access them. Though this might work if you have relatively few tabs, for me when I usually have 9 times as many tabs as what appears on the screen it isn't very fun.

History Management:
Because in my travels around the web I will undoubtedly need to go back to pages I have already visited, I like my browser history to be quick and easy. In this aspect Firefox works very well: with the click of the "history" button near the top left hand side of the screen you can see the last few pages that you have visited. If you need a more complete look you can press "all history" and a small window pops up that shows all of the recorded browsing history on that computer. One nice thing about Firefox is that not only does it allow you to delete specific pages from your browsing history, but it lets your forget specific sites too.

Bookmark Management:
The bookmark management in Firefox is handled much the same as the history: a quick press of a button and a dropdown menu appears. But what else is nice is that in addition Firefox lets you put your bookmarks on the tab bar as well.

Download Management:
Downloads in Firefox appear in a second window, and will download normally. Nothing special here, although it is nice that it doesn't take up another of my valuable tabs like some other browsers.

Do Web Pages Actually Work?
Because Firefox is the second most common browser behind Internet Explorer, web developers usually develop with Firefox in mind. I for one have yet to have found a page which did not fully support Firefox.

Closing Comments:
Firefox truly is a jewel of an Open-Source browser. It is fast, efficient, extremely customizable, and easy to use. In addition, it is developed by the Mozilla Corporation, and ultimately the non-profit Mozilla Foundation. So unlike some of its competitors, such as Microsoft, Google, and Apple, Mozilla isn't trying to further corporate gains.

Internet Explorer:

I must admit, I have a lot of bias against Internet Explorer. For versions 7 and 8 I've found it to be slow and in general not worth my time. But despite that deep resentment, I've tried to be unbiased when it comes to my examination of version 9. After all, despite that fact that pretty much the only people who switched to it were the silly people who used Internet Explorer anyway and didn't know any better, many geeks are begrudgingly being okay with it.

Tab Management:
In this regard IE really fails. The way that it comes out of the box is with the address bar on the same line as the tabs, effectively halving how much space the tabs have. Once you have nine tabs IE does the same thing as Firefox and puts them off the screen, so to access them you have to press an arrow. Now the redeemable thing about this with Firefox is that the tabs were still large enough that you could still read the title. But with IE they are already so small that pretty much the only thing you can see is the Favicion and the first letter of the title of the page. Okay, okay, I'll admit. It is very simple to put the tabs on their own row. So for people like me this is a non-issue. But for a lot of the people using Internet Explorer, AKA internet illiterate people, this is going to be a problem. So what if you put the tabs on their own row? Well, then the limit before the tabs go off the page is 23. So there is a bit of a tradeoff here: the tabs are too small to read anything of the title except the first letter, but so many tabs fit on a page that you can navigate even a large number easily. One more thing  about IE's tab management in Windows 7: when you make a new tab for all intents and purposes outside of the window the tab is a window. When you click the IE icon, where for other browser it shows the number of windows up, for IE it shows the tabs. So it is more laborious to find a different window.

History Management:
For the viewing history Internet Explorer 9 uses a fairly bulky sidebar (although technically you can make it smaller, that only makes it even more unwieldy). Because you aren't going to be leaving up your history sidebar for very long anyway, this is pretty much a non issue.

Bookmark Management:
Pretty normal. Nothing special of note.

Download Management:
Again, not much to talk about here. When you download a file it shows up at a small bar at the bottom. If you  have multiple files running you can click a button to show them all. Pretty standard.

Do The Pages Actually Work?
Depends. Because IE holds so much market share, web developers make a special effort so that the pages show up right. The problem with this is that it usually involves spending a lot of time trying to write HTML code that works correctly in IE. You see, Internet Explorer is notorious for not being HTML5 compliant. If you are not familiar with the term, basically there is a standard in what code should work in a browser, and HOW it should work in a browser. The problem is that IE is quirky and makes its own rules, causing much frustration for developers. Although I must admit that IE9 is much better at this than the previous versions, the other modern browsers are so much better it is ridiculous.

Conclusion:
Disregard Internet Explorer. It only runs on the Windows operating system, and it just doesn't work that well.

Safari

Your experience with Safari is quite different depending if you are on a Mac or a computer running Windows. Safari runs much quicker on it's native Mac, otherwise its speed is down around that of IE, which I can tell you right now is not a good thing. 

Tab Management:

Safari's tab management is pretty much a clone of Firefox's.

History Management:
Safari's History management is pretty much a clone of Firefox's. Although I do appreciate that it goes all the way down the page.

Download Management:
Safari's download management is pretty much a clone of Firefox's.

Do The Pages Work?
Yup.

Conclusion:
As you can see, despite running on the same engine as Chrome (WebKit), Safari's design is similar to Firefox's in many ways. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. But negative points for not running on Linux.

Chrome

Whenever you talk about Google Chrome, one thing that is certain to come up is the speed. Chrome really flies in this regard (no lame pun intended).

Tab Management:
After spanning from the left side of the page to the right, Google Chrome tabs just get smaller instead of going off the page. Though this is great for a decent amount of tabs, say 30, but once you get 39 tabs the favicons disappear. Favicons, by the way, are the little 16px x 16px images which are the symbol of a website. Like the white "F" on a blue background for Facebook. So once you have 39 tabs it is unbearable to keep track of them anymore. This is probably Chrome's greatest failing, in my sight anyway.

History Management:
Managing history in Chrome isn't alright, but not great. Ctrl + H will make a new tab for the history, a method which I don't like very much. Still, if you are okay with a brand new tab just for history then it is quite fluid in its handling.

Bookmark Management:
Chrome does this like most browsers. You have a toolbar at the top of the page under the address bar where you can put all your bookmarks. If you have more than can fit than you can access them by pressing a button.  Nothing special here.

Download Management:
I think that Chrome's download management is the best out of the five browsers. A very discreet bar appears at the bottom of the page with the different downloads. I don't know what happens if you have a lot of downloads, because I've never had more than two or three running at the same time. And because I doubt there is many people out there who would be in a situation where they had to download a lot of different files at the same time, it is a moot point.

Do The Pages Work?
They do indeed. Google Chrome is an extremely HTML5 compliant browser. No problems here.

Conclusion:
If you want a reliable and super quick browser, then Chrome is a good choice. Not quite as customizable as say, Firefox, but it still has quite a few extensions.

Opera

Opera, Opera, Opera. I had always taken this particular browser for granted. I had seen its stats in the past, and it always just seemed to be an average browser. Nothing special, just did its job. But after I actually tried out the browser myself I fell in love with it (not literally, after all me and Science are still together). Sure, it isn't a perfect browser. But the things that I use the most, the things I need, Opera does them quite admirably.

Tab Management:
To start off with, Opera was actually the first browser ever to incorporate tabs, so bonus points for that. But really, Opera is in my opinion the best browser for tab management. You can group similar tabs together, hiding all but one of them out of view. If you want to see what tabs are inside all you have to do is hover and you'll see the screenshot and name of each tab. You wouldn't believe how nice this is. It makes tab organization really, really easy. But what if you get too many tabs anyway? Well, unlike Chrome it is virtually impossible for the tabs to get so small that you can no longer see the favicon. Sure, they can get so small that it is extremely easy to click the "x" by mistake, but with the tab groups that never happens anyway. Oh, and one more very cool and super convenient feature that Opera has is the ability to clone individual tabs. The other option which I had always done in the past was copy the URL and paste it into a new tab, but this is much more efficient.

History Management:
The history management is in a separate tab, which is normally annoying, but because the tab management is so good in Opera it makes up for it.

Bookmark Management:
Standard. Move along.

Do The Pages Work?
Sadly, this is one of the problems with Opera. Because it not many people use the browser, many web developers will just ignore it when they go about developing their pages. A real shame.

Conclusion:
Opera isn't a perfect browser. It isn't the fastest or most popular. But depending on your needs, Opera could be for you. It is an innovate browser, often the cool features in many of the other browsers originated from Opera. Actually, Opera has 220 million users worldwide, which isn't a number to scoff at. The problem is that not many of those people are from North America.

Now remember, all of these browsers are customizable. In fact, if you looked hard enough you could probably find ways to replicate the features of your favorite browser on any of the other browsers. But because this often involves addons, and addons slow down your browser, this isn't always a good idea.