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Browser battle royale: Which should you use?

Column 鈥� Learn the ups and downs of Firefox, IE, Chrome, Safari, and Opera.

I can still remember very clearly the day that I downloaded my first Internet browser. It was early May, 1993 and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) had released a graphical browser called Mosaic a couple of weeks earlier, which allowed you to 鈥渟urf鈥� this thing called the World Wide Web. Unlike earlier, simpler browsers, such as Lynx, Mosaic used not only text, but pictures, video and audio clips, and hypertext links to connect sites around the world.

There were other browsers around at the time, but Mosaic was the one that literally changed the world. And looking at the suite of different browsers available on the Internet in 2009, they all still retain many of the original features developed for Mosaic, albeit greatly enhanced. (You can, in fact, still get a copy of the Mosaic browser from NCSA.)

These days, you have a broader choice of Internet browsers, despite the attempts by Microsoft to drive all the other browsers out of the space over the past decade. Microsoft鈥檚 Internet Explorer remains the most popular browser with a 65.9 percent share, but Mozilla鈥檚 open source Firefox has been showing a lot of strength in the past two years, controlling 22.9 percent of the browser market as of May 2009. (In 1999, IE was the browser choice of 95 percent of the market.)

Here is my own list of which browser to use, top to bottom.

Top choice: Mozilla鈥檚 Firefox 3.5

The hands down winner. Firefox was the browser to popularize the use of tabs, which allows you to open various sites in the same browser window, rather than having numerous version open on the desktop. Its first attempts at tabs were a bit clunky (I can remember a few times when I was working weekends at Boston.com and we would lose a fair bit of work because the tabs malfunctioned) but later versions are much more stable. The other great feature about Firefox is what is called 鈥渟ession restore.鈥� When you turn the browser off, it asks if you want to remember what you were currently looking at. If the browser closes without warning, it automatically remembers and restores your windows and tabs.

The 鈥淎wesome Bar鈥� is well, pretty awesome. Can鈥檛 remember that business site you visited yesterday and you don鈥檛 want to go back through all the history files. Just type business into the Awesome Bar and it will look for matches in your browsing history. The more you use it, the more it remembers. Wicked cool.

The Monitor looked into Firefox 3.5, the newest version, here.

Google鈥檚 Chrome

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鈥檚 currently only available for Windows, and Google tends to play fast and lose with privacy. The privacy policy on Chrome states 鈥渟ome Google Chrome features send limited additional information to Google.鈥� You鈥檒l like the performance, but use with caution. For more, check out our .

Opera 9.64

Opera doesn鈥檛 try to be all things to all people. And the folks who use it, LOVE it. It鈥檚 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鈥檛 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鈥檙e using a notebook computer or a laptop with limited memory.

Microsoft IE 8

It鈥檚 not that IE is a bad browser. It鈥檚 pretty decent, if a bit slow and clunky. It鈥檚 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鈥檛 want to leave a browsing history.

Safari 4

I鈥檓 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 鈥� not that there鈥檚 anything wrong with that.

鈥淚t鈥檚 fast, and almost never hangs up [i.e. crashed],鈥� 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鈥檝e used Safari and it鈥檚 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.