what is the best web browser to use?

[dwayne johnson]

i have really had enough of internet explorer especially when im trying to watch videos on you tube because it always is buffering what the best web browser to download and use?


i heard that fire fox is good

any ideas plz?

[monosodium]

The buffering comes from streaming video file size and will be present in any browser.

As for the "best" browser... Best is a pretty personal choice.

Personally I'd say keep using IE if you're using IE7 because installing other browsers can create the potential for something called a cross browser scripting attack. But there are various alternatives, I use a mix of browsers for testing, so here's a quick rundown...

FireFox is probably the most popular after IE (which will remain dominant mostly due to software restriction policies in most big corporations). I'm not keen on it because you cannot turn off a feature called "tabbed browsing" which I detest but many people like, you may like it too. FireFox is based on something called the Mozilla rendering engine (as are a number of other browsers).

In developer circles it is said that Mozilla supports web standards better - From experience I'd say that's debatable as many of the places people think IE is wrong tend to be where the standard is ambiguous (though no browser is flawless and there are places where both IE and Mozilla do silly things). There are a lot of add-in modules available for it some of which are quite good.

Opera I'd pretty much say is a wannabe FireFox - they've been in the web development game for a while but never really had the product, now they use the Mozilla engine and so the same applies as above. There are some differences, but nothing that would make it stand out massively.

Safari is Apple's entry into the browser market and I've yet to use it. I've heard mixed reactions about it, but on the whole people love it or hate it.


All those are free, so it's maybe worth spending some time installing them and seeing which you like best. That's the best way to decide which is best for you. None of them will fix the buffering issue though, you just need a faster internet connection for that.

[dwayne johnson]

thanks mate

[Venom]

I use a portable (no install) version of Firefox at work, its really good.

[cosmicB]

http://www.seamonkey-project.org/releases/

[DanMc]

Almost anything other than IE in my opinion - early versions in particular were a security nightmare. It's not the top browser because it's good, but because micro$oft used its muscle to bankrupt the then market leader Netscape by parcelling IE with Windows. Incidentaly, Mozilla and therefore Firefox derive from the original source code of Netscape.
As has been mentioned, Opera is worth trying - it's also cross platform, unlike Safari (Mac) or Epiphany/Galeon (Linux, and also based on Mozilla).

[monosodium]

Actually the whole browser wars thing was not quite as simple as that but it's easier to bash MS.

If you're not particularly interested then don't bother reading on...


Originally IE (3.1) became popular because the version of Netscape at the time was abysmal at best, there were other browsers which Netscape crushed by pricing out of the market (Opera barely survived at the hand of Netscape). Netscape crashed for a passtime, was expensive (compared to IE which was not originally released for free), it was clunky and offered no real value for the money (except a basic html editor).

Netscape then got bought by AOL, and with AOL being the kiss of death to everything they get involved with; Netscape didn't have a hope in hell. To be honest I'm still very suprised to this day that AOL allowed the Netscape source out to become the Mozilla engine, it's very unlike them, I can only imagine it had something to do with Mosaic.

MS did start relying on (and using) their market dominance because they're a company and that's what companies do regardless of what market they're in. If you're in the top spot then you can't really make any serious money by improving the product, it only has to be better than the other choices available. In that respect FireFox helps massively to improve IE because MS does seem to produce its best work when it has a genuine competitor.

Integrating IE into Windows also made great sense from a developer point of view as it was the same development team so they saw lots of opportunities to reuse code from IE to do nice stuff in the Windows interface without much effort, that's what made IE completely impossible to remove.

I heard rumours that MS were looking at dropping IE7 as a seperate app at one point, and they only really got their butts in gear when it looked like Firefox might actually become popular.

Sure there are holes in IE but FireFox is no better - every time I have to open FireFox to do some testing (usually once a month or so) it needs to download and install another security update, so it's hardly in a position to be laying claims to any superiority there.

[azraelle]

Konqueror for KDE/Linux

[cosmicB]

Very best is SeaMonkey 1.1.8... with the no-script addon...

[minigirl]

seamonkey does look interesting, combining as it does Web browsing, e-mail, chat, and an html editor in an easy to use package. it is handy if you want all your web tools bundled together. if you don't though, i can't see that there's much reason for changing to seamonkey in particular.

i can't say i'm keen on internet explorer - partly because it's microsoft and partly because it doesn't offer anything that other browsers don't have, other than the greatest number of security issues. yes, in its latest incarnation it has tabbed browsing, better security management, rss feeds and it can remember open tabs for your next session, but the others have that too. new vulnerabilities are found weekly or even daily. it also lacks the customizable interface available in firefox and opera, amongst others.

at work i use internet explorer. we don't have any choice - the network is set up in such a way that other browsers (if you can instal one, as the security restrictions only allow system administrators to instal programs - although i've managed to add a few things to my pc) will not connect to the internet. at home i used to use initially netscape, then mozilla and firefox. now i only use opera (unless i find one of those annoying pages that won't work unless you use internet explorer). my pc at home runs windows xp.

opera runs on more operating systems than any other browser, so it's particularly useful for those with older pc's and its security features do not depend on windows xp sp2. i find it very easy and straightforward to use. opera 9 includes widgets, or small web applications that sit on your desktop, and supports bittorrent. opera had tabs years before firefox. it's pretty well customisable, with plenty of skins available. maybe it's not as popular as the others because it only became free relatively recently, and quite a few people probably still think you have to pay for it. opera is also pretty fast and from what i've heard is fairly light on its use of system resources compared to other browsers (another reason to consider it if you have an older pc).

[cosmicB]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Free_web_browsers

[minigirl]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Free_web_browsers

really, i don't think posting a link to a page on wikipedia listing all the various web browsers available whether they are good, bad or indifferent answers the question "what is the best web browser to use?" - if you want to post something useful, perhaps you can instead tell us a bit more about seamonkey and why you think it is so great.

[minigirl]

if you just want to use a browser for browsing the web, or if you have an older pc, i would suggest using opera. if you want a browser that has all the extra add-ons, i would suggest firefox or possibly seamonkey (although i can't speak from personal experience as regards the latter, as i haven't used it).

[cosmicB]

You'll be impressed should you try SeaMonkey...
The name isn't so good, but the thing does everything a powerful browser can, plus a heck of a lot more...

Try it... It can't hurt... Just download 1.1.8 in a couple minutes.. and install it in a minute.. and you'll see...

Click that little icon at the lower left, the one that looks like a pen on a piece of paper... It has spell-check too... Good for forum posts...

Check out that little cable icon on the lower right.. it disconnects your PC from the Net.. and reconnects it...

Check out how many features right click mouse has...

Go to the top of the screen to Edit>Preferences>and go right through the pref's.. there is so much there...

I set my browser background color to soft gray...
I set the home page to Google...
I change nearly everything in pref's to my likes...

[wildmlt]

Lately i was using Safari...but since the release of Firefox 3 i started to use it...extremely fast...

Download it from here:

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all.html