A few months back, I was speaking with my friend, Ken. We were discussing a problem that he had on his home computer with regard to the speed of his internet. So, I put my tech support hat on and started asking him some questions. After a few basic questions, I asked if he had tried to use a different browser while surfing the ‘net. He told me that he had not. The next few minutes was the painfully slow process of navigating to the Firefox website and then downloading and installing Mozilla Firefox. As soon as the installation had completed, Ken started up his new Firefox browser and voila! His painfully slow internet issue was solved.
Granted. Ken’s issue can be blamed on his specific installation of IE and possibly some setting which slowed his browsing experience down to crawl. Instead of wading through a vastly inferior web browser, my recommendation was to abandon it all together and install a better browser. Plus, importing his bookmarks from Internet Explorer was a snap.
I have been using Firefox for a long time and recently started using Google Chrome, but this conversation, as well as more recent ones, led me to ask three questions.
1. How many people are still using Microsoft Internet Explorer?
Based on some data I acquired from some websites I maintain, these numbers are within a reasonable deviation from data acquired from a larger pool of internet traffic.
| Browser | Total Market Share |
|---|---|
| Microsoft Internet Explorer | 71.50% |
| Firefox | 15.87% |
| Safari | 10.38% |
| Chrome | 1.39% |
| Netscape | 0.41% |
| Opera | 0.19% |
What does it tell me? Simply, it is easy to click on that familiar IE icon and start browsing. In my opinion, that is only reason to pick IE. It certainly isn’t for its innovative browsing experience or its built-in security. The average internet user isn’t very critical with regard to its browser. Is that wrong? No.
Why am I? No idea, but my fiancée, DeeDee, occasionally wants to strangle me for this very reason (Honey, how do I know what the best couch in Tampa is if I haven’t seen all of them?)
Next question.
2. Is there any way to determine which is the fastest browser?
Yes, there is a free method used to determine which browser works best on your PC. Check out Peacekeeper.
Below is the benchmark results for my PC.
Wow!! Safari blew away the competition. I did not realize how cool the Safari browser is.
I give credit to Apple for creating this browser, and recommend you giving it a shot.
3. What browser am I using these days?
For my money, I will stick to using my new favorite browser, Google Chrome. It isn’t the only browser I use, but it is fast, and I use many of the features in the video below. Take a few minutes and check the video. By the way, Chrome 3 was released today and would recommend a look-see (especially if you are GMail, Google Calendar, etc. user).
Check out the video: 10 Features of Google Chrome.
