After basically swearing off Internet Explorer about three or four years ago I’ve been a pretty happy Firefox user but my interest in Google’s chrome has been piquing.
When we got stuck in Florida on our trip back from St Lucia last week we were lucky enough to get some time to hang out with my parents in Naples. In addition to affording me time with my parents I got to log onto a computer for the first time in 9 days- my mom’s. My mother will click any picture sent in an email by one of her friends that has a cute dancing bunny or heart on it (without any regard for the spyware or viruses she is downloading to her computer with that click). She also has a fondness for toolbars it seems.
On a 17 inch laptop she may have had 3 inches of visible screen real estate after you account for the 8 or so toolbars that she has running in her Internet Explorer browser. Let’s see, I think there was Yahoo toolbar, AOL toolbar, Google toolbar, something called Smilebox,and two or three coupon alert toolbars that I could remember.
Clearly I needed to download a new browser for her. All this crap she had downloaded brought her laptop to a crawl. I could almost hear it crying out for help, saying “Please, help me tell me you’re not going to add more crap to my already splitting at the seams workload”
So I downloaded Safari for her. I’m not really sure why I picked Safari but it probably had to do with the fact that I was using Safari for the past 8 days on my iPad and it’s a pretty clean interface. So once I got Safari on her laptop and imported a bunch of her favorite bookmarks to her toolbar and gave her a quick lesson on how to add bookmarks she was off and running. The new browser started up about twenty times faster, there was about 80% more screen real estate due to the lack of those layers of toolbars stacked from the top of her screen to three quarters of the way down. It will work well for her.
So I got home and the Mrs’ laptop has Internet Explorer as the default browser as well. The Mrs to her credit is pretty good about detecting what she should and shouldn’t click on. (Anyone have any general rules we could pass on to folks as to what you use for criteria for what you will and won’t click on?) But I’m just not a fan of Internet Explorer. It seems so sluggish and automatically hyperlinks things I don’t want hyperlinked, the security settings slow me way down and it doesn’t offer me single right click access to image url addresses and other geeky stuff that 97% of you probably needn’t worry yourselves about but to a person that really uses these features can drive nuts.
So I decided to check out Chrome on her laptop. It was a quick download and I really like the minimalist and clean layout. I haven’t used it enough to really know if it could replace Firefox on my desktop at work but it really simplifies many steps such as bookmarking and I love how doesn’t use up a lot of your screen with toolbars. It also seems super speedy.
So this leads me to ask my viewership- Which web browser do you use and why? Please leave a comment and let me know where you place your browser love?
Good Morning Gloucester 
Running Firefox and very happy with it. Would love to try out Chrome, but sadly that technology has passed my Power PC-chipped Mac G5 by since it only works on the newer Intel-chipped Macs. Sadly, that is a frequent limitation that my G5 has, and after seeing that the new Mac Mini has the same power as my 6-year-old top-of-the-line-at-its-time G5, I may have to break down and get a new computer relatively soon. Would be happy to trade the gigantic silver box for a sleek little thing the size of a stack of CDs though! 🙂
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I use internet explorer because thats what came with my computer and I didn’t know I had a choice. I’m not very good with computers but I’m learning.
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Just in case you want to use a good browser 🙂 http://www.google.com/chrome
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GREAT POST! Joey.
Will have to try out a few These.
Sincerely Paul “Paulie Walnuts” F. Frontiero Jr. 🙂
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GREAT POST! Joey.
Will have to try out a few of These.
Sincerely Paul “Paulie Walnuts” F. Frontiero Jr. 🙂
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I use both Firefox and Chrome. I like Chrome better but there are a few (just a few) websites that don’t support it, one of which is Timebanks 😦 So mostly I use Firefox and it is okay but Chrome is faster, both to load (much faster) and to run.
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Chrome certainly seems a whole lot snappier than anything I’ve used in the past.
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I have been there from the first mosaic browser back in the 90’s and I must say Chrome just replaced firefox for me, which I have used for many years. IE is a joke! Chrome is the fastest around.
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I do web design, so my computers have all the major browsers, plus I have to check websites against the older versions of IE. IE is always the problem child when it comes to making websites work, and it has the tendency to add toolbars without asking, even if I uninstall them! My default browser is Firefox because it has all the development tool addons, but Safari is cool because you can see your recent history and your top sites at a glance. Chrome is really clean and usually offers no surprises when debugging sites.
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It’s Chrome all the way for me! I went so far as to DELETE the MS Explorer desktop and taskbar links on my home PC, after having some major frustration with loading pages. Google products just make sense to me… they’re more intuitive. To be fair, though, I haven’t spent much time as a Firefox user.
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I agree with Theatrium Design except my default browser is chrome mainly because it loads a lot faster.
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90% Safari, 8% Chrome, 2%Firefox. I I thought about it I suppose I would use Chrome the most since it is the fastest but then I download a new version of Safari and the speed jumps right up.
The trick with Safari is to do a nice clean reset every once and a while. Dump history, cache, even cookies. I usually only toss my cookies about once a year since all passwords to sites are gone. Sometimes even a clean reinstall of the program speeds things up too.
Chrome seems to be the least cluttered, speediest, most compatible browser since Turbogopher. 😉 Those were the days, before NCSA Mosaic arrived.
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I find it interesting that Firefox gets the majority of votes in the poll but my guess is that the poll is skewed because most of the people that are using Internet Explorer probably don’t understand the question as to what a browser even is so they probably aren’t voting. Most likely these are the same folks that don’t know that they can click on the comment below each post to leave a message and instead email the GMG email address (not that there’s anything wrong with that) 🙂
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Chrome ~ definitely ~ gave up on IE ~ and all its unasked for add ons ~ Read PC mag recently and they preferred Chrome ~ Firefox has been recommended to me ~ but am staying with Chrome ~ cleaner ~ faster ~ thanx for post ~ hugs and namaste, Carol and ArtMuse Dog 🙂
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I was told by Fidelity that it has the best Firewalls! If you find out otherwise please let me know.
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