Which Browser is Best? Not I.E.

Internet Explorer really leaves a lot to be desired these days.  It is very slow compared to Firefox, seems to freeze up a lot, and leaves one feeling that it spends too much time acquiring data from your experience with it and not enough time focusing on the experience of browsing.  I have no idea where MS is going with this and it’s a mystery since they do so well in other areas.

Firefox is great.  I have very few problems with it and each upgrade seems to be a real advance in the business of browsing.  Chrome is definitely fast!  The downside being the intuitive nature of it is odd and they put too much design effort into hiding commands and features, to the point that it can be difficult to manage.  I keep falling back to Firefox because it is so reliable, easy to control, and the extensions allow it to be completely customized.

Two add-on features I feel I can’t live without are NoScript and Adblock Plus.  Both are extremely effective.  I like knowing that scripts just can’t run unless I approve them, almost like running in Linux.  AdBlock Plus completely removes ads, pop-ups, and maybe more, I don’t know since I don’t see them.  I do place ads on my web page and yes, they don’t show up in Firefox with AdBlock Plus unless the user approves them.  That’s okay, since I have the same and can truly allow ads I want to see.

The only issue I’ve had so far is that Yahoo! Toolbar doesn’t work quite as well in Firefox.  The search portion of the toolbar is glitchy.  It’s easy to work around since the standard search bar is still in the regular Firefox toolbar anyway.  I’m not surprised about Yahoo! acting up since they have long preferred to optimize for I.E.

Although I prefer to use Firefox for most things I have a tendency to use I.E. and Firefox at the same time.  It’s good practice if you want to log into the same service with several different user IDs.   For instance, I have multiple user IDs for WordPress and it’s much easier to set Firefox to remember one account and I.E. to remember the other.  Then, if I need to I can always pop open a Chrome window to do something else.