What web browser is best?

I have been using Edge for a while now, well since windows 10 launched but I am not sure I like it. what does everyone use and what would you consider the best option other than Edge and Windows Explorer?

Jamie

 

Chrome

 

I have been reading that. How does that compare with Firefox?

 

Switched from Firefox in 2011, haven't looked back

 

Ok, can I ask why? What makes chrome better?

 

When I switched, it was because Firefox was more bloated and crashed more often, and Chrome was faster

 

Chrome is definitely faster but Firefox are nicer people

Sent from my Nexus 6 using Tapatalk

 

i have both on my machine right now and just trying to figure out which one to use. what do you mean firefox are nicer people?

 

They are a free and open source browser compared to Chrome which is part of Google's ecosystem primarily made for profit.

 

Pretty much the same here.

 

Chrome is based on Chromium, and Mozilla isn't exactly a beacon of light either

 

Chromium is what I use in Linux generally. Don't get me wrong I have nothing against google but I think Firefox just has higher moral standards

Sent from my Nexus 6 using Tapatalk

 

Pfft

 

But doesn't Chrome track your every move. Or has that been fixed?

 

So ultimately, which browser would you use?

 

I use both Firefox and Chrome. I would say Chrome feels slightly faster, and I usually recommend chrome to less "techie" people (parents, etc..) because it has its own built in flash that updates itself, so I don't have to worry about them needing to constantly update adobe flash. Plus Chrome is nice because it has a built in PDF reader.

 

Why do you use both?

 

I used to be a hardcore "Firefox only" user, because it had the extensions and add-ons I liked. Plus up until about 2 years ago, Chrome didn't render perfectly on some sites, so I only used Firefox (and some IE) for HTML coding. Now I use Firefox for my main / trusted sites and manage those cookies carefully. I use Chrome for everything else and just wipe the cookies after each browsing session. I guess I'm cookie paranoid.

 

I use Firefox. It doesn't feel slow to me nor do I have crash issues. I do have Flash disabled so maybe that's why.

 

same here. Disabled flash and made it click to enable. Much faster browsing and NO auto playing videos.

 

Why...because I can . I use EI 9 for the forums and firefox for everthing else.

 

'Best' must be whatever one feels comfortable using. Here's it's Firefox, always been fast & stable, no crashes whatever pc used. & that great choice of add-ons makes it impossible to use anything else :O)

 

I like Firefox, mainly because I frequently use metered internet connections and so the ability to easily disable images from loading saves a surprising amount of data usage. Other than that there aren't huge differences - the way that Chrome auto updates the flash plugin saves time but it's not hugely difficult to do it manually in Firefox. My main reason for using Firefox is familiarity - it suits all my needs at present, although I don't doubt that Chrome would work fine too. Try both - half an hour of comparison should be enough.

 

Same here I use IE11 because my work and some sites are written for IE codes and FF for the rest. But I use and switch between both.

Same here it's the history of FF that I like it and use it still since it came out. I don't have alot of addons but being able to customize it makes it a good platform to use and also having more then one Browser to test whether a site is working or not also is good to have.

 

i use Opera and Safari...i like them both.

 

Bad part Safari isn't for Windows...so posting to the correct O/S when replying also does help.

 

Opera v12.16 (2013-07-04):

Spoiler: 22 pages of user-customisable settings

Spoiler: features

• panels

• free re-arrange menus, buttons, bars etc.

• mouse gestures

• one-button shortcuts

• dragonfly

• source

• validate

• site preferences

• site style sheet / css (this forum is a *^&! without that ...)

• open with (browser xyz)

• identify as (browser xyz)

• reload every (x seconds)

• block content (wildcards; ipfilter.ini)

• wand.dat (encrypted this time ... *ahem*)

• embedded torrent client

• user-customisable keyboard

• user-customisable mouse

• user-customisable menu

• user-customisable alt-menu

• user-customisable agent

• user-customisable javascript

• user-customisable style sheets

• customised one-letter search engines

• opera : config

• opera : plugins

• +++

 

thats why i use srware iron, performance of chrome with nice people from firefox

its a chromium based open source browser all spy functions disabled

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

 

1. Downloads+extracts Iron (portable)
2. Starts Chrome
3. 'Bookmark Manager -> Organize -> Export bookmarks to HTML file...'
4. Starts Iron -> 'Import bookmarks and settings'
5. Deletes folder 'Chrome' (is was portable x64)

Still can't hold a candle to Opera v12, though. Sadly, browser discrimination is rampant and no updates for 2+ years does have its drawbacks, so still need something 'non-obscure' as a fall-back. Too bad it's 32-bits, but that's what Waterfox is for (x64 portable Firefox; 4GB+ memory use).

 

I prefer Firefox myself. Just use what you like and keep the "add-ons" to a bare minimum.

 

I prefer Chrome since it has the sync thingy and I don't remember most of my accounts on the internet. Very good for multiple tabs. In before, I usually open like 10 20 tabs but I think Chrome also uses more resource. On my old dual core laptop, watching Youtube on Chrome or Firefox will show a noticeable difference in CPU usage. Few years ago, when I was wondering between Firefox and Chrome, I tried both and Firefox crashed more often. Heard it gets better now though.

Used Opera for a time too. Beautiful browser, can make your own theme or something of sort without add-on or extension. Ctrl Tab works like Alt Tab so you can choose, not like Chrome and Firefox. But it's slow and often has issues.

 

they also offer a 64bit version, but the download links are in their forums, for whatever reason

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

 

if you are a big fan of government [and their private contractors, which outnumber the salaried spooks] intruding on your freedom, Chrome is your ticket to ride. If not, choose anything else and you'll still get snooped, but can take some reasonable measures against.

slimjet is pretty good.
firefox, as noted, is perpetually buggy, but they do allow and encourage third party add-ons & plugins that help a person avoid robotic snoops and spooks. it is awfully laggy in the current iteration. in the past I have had occasional better results from their "Nightly" version but caveat emptor as Nightly means 'experiment'.

Hardly anyone believes this but it is true and you can try it yourselves and see I'm right. If you are fond of videos, IE11 is the most efficient browser at that game and it is not even a close contest at the moment. you can read a half dozen reviews on "best browser", "fastest browser", "whatever browser", and none will test or mention this. that's strange, given that 80% of the bandwidth traffic on the 'net is video. I use IE11 for videos - youtube, vimeo, whatever, and firefox for what I don't want piping directly to nsa/cia/has/alphabet-du-jour. my bookmarks are mostly firefox, which is a miscalculation since their tags do not transfer when moving systems [be warned].

Opera is pretty good except they cannot make their system handle bookmarks. apparently it is a company objectives to always butcher the users bookmarks without prejudice. been that way for years and they are not interested in fixing.

the best browser on earth at the moment is Dolphin. They wisely stay far away from Windows.

 

I use Firefox 32 bit,,and am waiting for Firefox 64 to go main stream now beta *, there have been issues, nothing too dramatic, works fine for me with flash enabled, plugins secure privacy ect, not like other swiss cheese browsers with so many holes in it, they stop trying fix the leaks, little dutch boy only has 10 fingers and 10 toes to leaks, the other browsers are beyond that, lol.

Firefox 64-bit - version 42.0b8 (Beta 8) is released 2015-10-20

Cheers
3Fees

_____________________________________________________________________________________
HP Pavilion 17" AMD Elite A10-5750M-8750G-APU,Micron-Crucial Ballistix Sport- 16GB DDR3L- 1866Mhz with automatic Over/Under Clocking of DDR3 Ram by the AMD APU-1866 MHz Memory Controller-Built in the APU Architecture, Samsung 850 Pro 256GB SSD,Logitec LS1- Laser Mouse 5000 DPI, Seagate Backup Plus USB 3.0 drive -1TB size,Backup-Samsung 840 EVO 250GB- USB 3.0, Windows 10 Pro, 64 Bit installed. I have Lexar S33 32GB USB 3 Jump Drive ~ 100/50 MB/s.

Acer Aspire 15.6" Intel i5 5200U, 1-8GB Ram ,16GB max,Nvidia GeForce 940M w 2GB dedicated graphics memory, 1080P 1920x1080, Cuda, Optimus,PhysX,GPU Boost 2.0, DirectX 12 (FL_11.x) ,Win 10 Home,(inbound) Brand New, 1 yr Warranty, ect.

No doubt this 940M is the flagship is sales and will get the most attention for driver support, ect,me, part of group of 1000+ sold in 24 hrs,today,2,000 Notebooks sold + of this model, fast,,lol, the Nivdia company I know caters to middle class consumers -where the most sales are ,From whom did they learn this ?,,lol. Next yr flagship GPU in sales,1 of 1000 series will group with this one.lol

Thank You Dr Barry Lam

 

If you like staring at a small screen....then by all means go ahead I'll take my Desktop 27" IPS and 17" and 15" laptop over that any day. Less one forget they also have their hands in the Mobile company lines to metadata your calls as well so Android isn't safe by any stretch of the imagination.

 

I use Dolphin on my Samsung tablet 12" but prefer Firefox on my win 7 64 desktop. Stormjumper, Dolphin works on large screen Android tablets just fine.

 

Got it on many pc's for many years, xp\7\8, always stable and fast here, can't even remember seeing a crash. With heavy use and tabs all over the place. Tried 'the others' but always back to FF. Just a note, as anyone else's mileage may vary.

 

I should say I trust ffox a tad more than the others on PC Microsoft things - That's not saying a lot but it is where I keep my bookmarks, and I have a lot of em. I keep a bunch also on Dolphin on my android and IOS devices but periodically sweep up and stash in ffox. I just wish Mozilla or a third party would come up with an easy way to maintain tags seamlessly across versions.
but ffox and chrome both are consumptive on vids right now as noted. ie not so much, and edge cannot be locked down so I consider it unsafe and don't use or recommend.
all the browsers are necessarily VERY complex - like an Operating System riding on the back of another Operating System, and exploit opportunities galore. the worst of the malware attacks come via browsers anymore and ancillary wares - like adobe reader! and no, IOS/OSX are hardly immune. I remove them for folks...

 

Tablets aren't the same a Power laptop or Power desktop by any stretch of the imagination. Also if one read the Forum here it says Windows O/S discussion.

 

Like I've tell others nothing is safe but if you go to such dark sites then consider yourself a target or install questionable software on your Browser then your inviting a hack. In this age of "Click happy instant gratification" those doing so will get nailed regardless of the Browser you use-rather then do Smart Browsing. And the bigger the Big Name program - you can consider it a bigger target and to think otherwise is logic beyond ill-logical. But this comes with a caveat that they get more fixes and support for those software as oppose to smaller software that don't get update as fast thus causing more hacking before it is discovered. And Apple OSx was one of those that denied they got hacked until it was posted and they had to admit their OSx wasn't so secure as they claimed it to be.

 

It depends on what you want to use the browser for. For me, the emphasis is on efficient browsing with user-customizability build in - often manifesting itself in things like user-configurable keyboard shortcuts. For that reason, Opera 12 has been my go-to for years, and it's still my most-used this year. Single-key shortcuts and the built-in customizeability save me more time than faster rendering would. It also supports arbitrarily many tabs well - I've used 80-100 tabs in Opera 12 before without issue, and likely could have used more if I'd been running the 64-bit version.

However, its rendering engine is showing its age after no update in almost 3 years, resulting in more sites that are incompatible or cause crashes. So, I've been using Vivaldi (whose logo I've adopted here) and Firefox more. I think Vivaldi is the future for power users, as it really takes Opera 12's philosophy and brings it forward (unlike Opera 15+). It's still in early days, and still is less stable than Firefox and even 3-year-old-rendering Opera 12, but is customizeable, and has some neat features like folders in speed dial. I suspect that for 2016, Vivaldi will become my primary browser.

When using Firefox, I miss the customizeability that Opera and, increasingly, Vivaldi offer. I've been able to get some of it such as Opera-like Speed Dial through extensions, and while sometimes that works well, in other cases they are buggier or less feature-complete than the Opera implementation - and whether that's due to limitations of the extension system, or just that they aren't professionally developed can be difficult to tell. But it's why I generally prefer a more feature-complete browser like Opera 12 than one that has fewer features but better extension support like Firefox. Overall, Firefox works well for me, but I've been using it more this year is primarily as a transition between Opera 12 and Vivaldi, rather than an intended destination.

I think additional non-browser-related features can also add value. Opera 12 has built-in BitTorrent and IRC clients that do the job pretty well. Firefox Hello does web chats, and while it's new and I haven't used it much yet, from when I have used it, it has worked well, and I can see myself using Firefox for that.

I haven't used Chrome much since the Google integration is a negative for me (the only Google product I use semi-regularly is YouTube), and haven't used IE much since 2006. Even when I have used IE 11 at work for IE-only sites, it's been slower (particularly in the UI, such as opening new tabs) than other browsers, with the sort-of-nice tab coloring when opening new tabs being the only feature that really seems to set it apart for my use. On the rare occasions I use a mobile browser, it's Opera Mobile (not Mini), which is decent but straddles the awkward divide of not being a truly modern HTML5 browser, nor having a desktop-size screen to display on, yet being advanced enough that some sites treat it as a desktop browser and won't sent it their mobile site.

 

The problem here is that some sites work better in IE specific works related Office suites and some work better in Firefox. So no one browser is universal for going to sites but until the codes are unified sites will use different coding to work more with one Browser or the other.

 

I'm very happy with Chrome actually. I have Firefox installed, but almost don't use it, because Chrome is simply a lot faster, probably because of better cache-usement.

If a site only supports IE, simply install IE-Tab in Chrome, click on it when the site only works on IE, done.

The ability to translate pages I also find very helping in Chrome. With the right settings and addons, Chrome also isn't really able to spy on you. i. e. google "hide.me forum" , go to the enlish part and look for "manuals" , the you'll get to know what exactly can be done, to be as anonymous as possible.

 

For sure; at my current employer there are a number of internal sites that only work with IE, or work best with IE - although now that the company finally is upgrading to IE11 (yes, to, not from), those are becoming rarer. So I have to use IE for those.

At my previous employer, I was involved in an effort to improve the product I worked on so that, along with other enhancements, it would work cross-browser, not just on IE and sort-of-most-of-the-time on Firefox. So that's one less only-supports-IE corporate application!

At home though, there's only one site I can think of that I have to use IE for, with a few more that require a major browser, such as mega.co.nz, for which I usually use Firefox. Thankfully most sites that aren't corporate-targeted are decently cross-browser these days (and increasingly many of those that are corporate-targeted), so the biggest limitation I run into is sites that require an HTML5 element that's newer than what Opera 12 supports, in which case pretty much any browser that's regularly updated (except perhaps IE11) will support it. As that increases in frequency, I've correspondingly moved to more recent browsers (and indeed both of my posts in this thread have been from Vivaldi).

 

I've read of the Chromium based better privacy version called "SRWare Iron" and will test it immediately. Sounds very good, is as up to date as Google is, but without all that spying, and even available as a portable variant. I wonder very much, that this is still unknown by many users that are very experienced, even my VPN-provider didn't advise to use it yet.

There also seem to be interesting other versions of Firefox, read something of Waterfox, might aswell be worth a look.

And something that came across to me last week, was the "CU Browser" (hope the name is right) to be "the fastest browser of all" . That one has a history on Microsoft phones and has legendary status there, but the PC-version is still not working entirely / bugged, but it could become very interesting if they are able to develop a stable, working version!

 

Just read the thread completely and found this: @ Fees: You can use Firefox 64 without any fear now. I used it many times over the past 2-3 months, and had exactly one problem in that time, Firefox was getting very slow, but installing a new user profile solved it, which took me not even 10 minutes. I didn't have any crashes I can remember.

Still, Chrome is just a lot faster, and SRWare Iron sounds just too good to be true. "Chrome based browsing with a community like Firefox" , what could be better than that? Sry to be blatant, but Firefox simply cannot compete anymore imo., browsing with Chrome is two times faster or similar, and Chrome has a decent addon-support that imo lacks nothing, it has AdBlockPlus, it has https-everywhere, BlockReferrer, Ghostery, WebRTCblock and with all of those, it's privacy is equal to the one of Firefox including it having the same necessary changes / addons.

 

those are the exact reasons ive been using iron for years now and i agree, its strange how little coverage that browser gets considering what its capable of.

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

 

If you want unknown program install and toolbars be my guest...

This is grabbing for straws again. I don't need adblock plus that it now allows ads to come through - if you haven't been keeping up with the times. I use PC hosts edit and that more then wipe clean chrome anytime of the day and it works for IE without having to add on more Memory hog programs.

 

I'll test SRWare Iron and Waterfox in the following days, so I'll report about it. Atm. I wouldn't know, how a portable version of a browser could install an unknown program.

And it's fine, if you block ads via your host-file, but you didn't comment on any of the other addons. I got the advice to use them from my VPN-provider, which gets top-scores in any tests and has a very good support. It has nothing to do with "grabbing for straws" , those are simply the tools one needs nowadays, to stay at least minimally private and safe when browsing. You even speaking of using IE doesn't give me any confidence to trust in what you say, IE is probably the worst, slowest and most unsafe browser of all. It'd be the first time I ever even hear someone advising to use it, my status of knowledge about it, is to bestly block the upgrade of its newer versions and to stay away from it. Also, a few addons using some memory is nothing a good PC cannot handle atm., and if you don't use them, you should be aware of, that any site you go to knows exactly where you come from, where you were before that, traces you further via trackers and cookies, they can trace almost the exact location where you are, you're vulnarable to RTC-attacks, Flash-cookies, E-Tags and all the likely.

Tbh, your post reads like a really bad troll, provide decent info in an acceptable manor or go.

 

All his posts are like that