Internet Explorer, Apple Safari, and Mozilla Firefox. Ring any bells? Well, they should. Odds are, you’re probably using one right now. That’s right, these are web browsers, designed so we can exploit the Internet for whatever it may offer us; be it scientific articles for research or pterodactyl porn for… something.
If you haven’t heard lately, there’s a nice little browser war going on. The top competitors are IE, Safari, and Firefox, with each one ripping off the other faster than a monkey picking nits. And despite the numerous browsers out there, the first three stand out on top as the browsers of choice for the mainstream users with IE taking first, Firefox taking second, and Safari coming in third as of 2008.
First and foremost, Safari and IE comes with the operating system, but even the US Government recommends that you switch away from IE (). The main reason for such feelings of distrust towards IE is the atrociously large amount of exploits which take advantage of IE (). Plus, IE is just too slow at times; I found this out personally by loading the website www.roosterteeth.com as a benchmark of the three browsers and found that it took less than 10 seconds on both Safari and Firefox, but will take 20 seconds on IE.
Safari on the other hand, felt a lot like a watered down version of Firefox at first, but once I started playing around with it, it became a little tough for me to go back. Safari, in my opinion, was designed for adolescents, with the whole Private Browsing mode that is mostly used to watch porn. What Safari offers with the new 4.0 Beta is the ability to have your top sites visited displayed as well as your history in coverflow format. However, all of that is just for show. In terms of usability, nothing has really changed. But if you’re looking for a more aesthetically pleasing browser than before, then make the upgrade.
Finally, we have what many consider the golden treasure of browsers straight from the Ark of the Covenant: Mozilla Firefox. While it lacks the ActiveX controls found in IE, it compensates with the multitude of add-ons that have been developed by professionals and the community at large. Firefox was the first browser of the three to tell its users if a site they had visited was potentially fraudulent back in June of 2008. This feature was later implemented in Safari 4.0. However, this doesn’t make Firefox as the best browser of all three. While it has been faithfully addressing issues and exploits in the past, Firefox has started on a turn for worse and many bugs and glitches are beginning to pop up. Let the browser wars rage on!