The battle of the desktop browsers – which is best?

We’ve been debating the question of which Internet browser is best in the office this morning. I think the debate started because Google has a number of posters up advertising Chrome and we were reminiscing about times gone by when Netscape ruled the world (remember way back then?).

Anyway, I thought I’d share a little bit of knowledge and some links to some info for BT customers if they were thinking about using a different browser at home. Wikipedia (as at March 2011) says the breakdown of worldwide usage is as follows: Internet Explorer - 43%, Firefox - 29%, Google Chrome – 14.6% and Safari – 6.3%. The rest are mobile browsers.

I’ll leave off my comments on Safari for now, as it’s an Apple operating system and only applicable for those using Apple products (and those people tend to be advocates of Safari and understand it well anyway!)

Internet Explorer is the most used browser across the world, and is made by Microsoft. It’s on it’s 9th version now on mass release, though IE7 and 8 are the most widely used versions. As the most popular browser Internet Explorer tends to work with most sites on the Internet.

Generally the pros of IE are: Good tab features, less crashing (than previous versions anyway!), privacy options are good and the security is good. On the downside people generally claim it is slow to respond compared to other options and it uses a lot of the memory on your computer.

Mozilla Firefox is a free and open-source browser (essentially meaning any developers can access its code and make it better) which is rapidly gaining momentum as a favourite browser in some countries.

It is usually judged as much faster than Internet Explorer and is very customisable – so you can suit your own browsing style. On the downside it can be confusing that there is lots of options for a basic Internet user and there can be a lot of add-ins needed to run certain features.

Google Chrome is brought to you by Google, the company who own most of the search engine space on the internet, and the biggest media company in the world.

They do engineer software well, so this is bound to be a good browser. Certainly this is my one of my browsers at home, and I got onto the Beta trial early, and generally was converted. What’s good about it? Its very simple and fast, the search from the address bar is the best I have seen and the link with Google software is great.

I think that the theory that Google can monitor your web usage and use to build advertising profiles is the biggest downside people would talk about with Chrome, and those who like Firefox would comment on the lack of add-ins available.

I think that it is personal choice for which browser you use (or stay on the fence and use all of them if you prefer) as there are pros and cons to all of the ‘big three’. 

Certainly I am a fan of Chrome, but still use IE for work as it’s more universal and compatible with online resources I use. I went through a phase of using Firefoxand have one laptop with that as my main browser, so no qualms on using this either.

I suggest BT customers have a read of the links for each browser above, and don’t be afraid to try something new to see if you can get a better browsing experience than you have today.

Who wins the battle of the browsers for you? Which browser are you using and what are the benefits?