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The Internet statistics shows that people mostly use Internet Explorer to browse the Internet. The other browsers like Firefox, Opera, Safari and now Chrome are not as popular as Internet Explorer. There is nothing unusual about that because Internet Explorer comes with all editions of Windows operation system and supported by Microsoft. After all, all Internet browsers do the same thing – show the pages on websites of World Wide Web, that’s it, so there’s technically no difference which browser to use.

And if you would have said this, you would be wrong because:

(1) The security is approached differently by different browsers. The security settings differ too and missing a setting could let some nasty cookie or a trojan into the computer.

(2) All the browsers have their own engines, with which they interpret the data received from an Internet server in order to show this data on user’s computer display.

(3) Different engines mean different speed – some browsers run quicker than the others.

So in regards to the above, the studies show that Firefox is the most secure of all and also the fastest even though its loading time seems longer than the one of Internet Explorer’s. Opera and Safari are somewhere in the middle.

All Internet websites and applications have standards – these standards ensure that the web code behind the web pages is interpreted correctly by the browsers. The standards are agreed internationally and the organisations that look after them are internationally recognised and respected. But Microsoft always goes its own way, so when Internet Explorer was created as an alternative to the Internet browser Netscape, which dominated Internet since the very beginning of it until IE has showed up, Microsoft have put their own standards in and the programmers and designers who create the web pages have to cope with them till this day.

Internet Explorer 7 has made the big step towards universal standards but IE 6 still have a lot of problems with them. On the other hand Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome do not generally require additional “coping for” programming.

Recently, there has been a scandal about Internet Explorer newest vulnerability issue and a patch that has immediately followed. This has even spilled into the papers and television news programs. If the same sort of problem was to occur to say Firefox, would it be discussed as widely as the problem in IE? The answer is “no” because Firefox is not only used only by only about 18% of the Internet population but also because it dot not issue patches like Microsoft does but prepares a new version, which a user is informed about immediately. This is definitely a plus. Opera also informs a user when a new version is available.

Multiple browser installations on the computer ensure the multiple browser instances can be opened on this computer. I’m not talking about the browser tabs but about the separate browser sessions. For example if you’re doing Internet banking with the secure connection, no matter how many tabs or windows you open with one browser, it still will be considered as one session. To open the second one not affecting the first one, you would need a separate browser.

Firefox has been developed as an open-source application, so there are a lot of plugins and add-ons that have been created for it. This is not the case with Internet Explorer, which is a Microsoft’s child. There are only common use plugins available for it like multimedia players or java applications. For Firefox, one can find literally hundreds very useful plugins like translators, picture viewers, link sharers. In this blog, I’ll later publish the ones that I use and find very useful.

Considering all of the above, the advice I’d give to the computer users regarding the Internet browsing, the security, the performance and everything around it is as follows:

– use Firefox as your main browser, set it up to be as secure as possible and keep it up to date. Having version 2 when version 3 is available is not acceptable. Check out many available plugins.

– occasional use of Internet Explorer is not a bad thing if you need a separate session or encounter a website, which has been optimised only for Internet Explorer. Keep IE up to date by monitoring Windows Updates and occasionally local and national newspapers, radio and TV :-).

– use Opera if you often work with many tabs.

– give Chrome a try if you often work with Google and all your Internet browsing is based around Google.