Chrome
Windows
only (for practical purposes, but soon on Mac and Linux, if we're
lucky): Some browsers have roots going back to the early 1990s—Chrome,
on the other hand, is the new kid on the block. Although Chrome has a
distant relationship to Konqueror and is a cousin to the Safari web
browser—both share the speedy WebKit rendering engine—Google's browser
is less than a year old. Despite its youth, it's already garnered praise
for its minimalist interface and snappy page rendering. Chrome also
handles site errors and quirks well, and each individual tab is a unique
process, so a crash or lag in one shouldn't pull down or crash the
others. In general, though, Chrome has caught attention for running a
performance-focused JavaScript engine in a lightweight GUI. Also worth
noting, Chrome has been holding its own in the recent Pwn2Own security challenge,
with the distinction of being the only browser left standing after the
first day of security exploits and attacks.
Opera
Windows/Mac/Linux:
Opera is a rock-solid browser with roots stretching back to 1994. Many
of the features baked right into Opera are either not implemented in
other browsers, or require multiple extensions at the cost of system
resources—navigation by mouse gestures is one of the flashier examples.
Despite being feature-packed, Opera has a fairly small market share, due
largely in part to being trialware up until 2000 and
advertisement-supported until 2005—many people were turned off by the
expense, if not the ads. Still, Opera proponents have long claimed that
Opera beats Internet Explorer and Firefox when it comes to speedy
rendering. Another selling point for Opera is the quality of the
built-in tools. For many users, the built-in RSS reader, email client,
and BitTorrent client do their jobs admirably, cutting down on the
number applications they need running at once. Opera is extensible, but
the pool of available extensions is radically smaller than that
available for Firefox.
Firefox
Windows/Mac/Linux:
Firefox is the grandchild of the venerable Mosaic browser and
free-roaming son of Netscape. Although Firefox has a myriad of
user-friendly, forward-thinking features, a decently secure framework,
and an open-source ideology, its most prominent is extensibility. When
convincing a Firefox user to abandon Firefox for anything else, even
temporarily, you won't have to fight them over giving up the AwesomeBar
or about:config tweaks—you'll hear a common, understandable refrain:
"What about my extensions?" The repository of extensions maintained by
Mozilla currently has over 6,000 entries, covering everything from
blocking advertisements, to managing your clipboard, to allowing you to
further customize your browsing experience with scripts a la
Greasemonkey (here's 10 of our must-have picks). Combine the passion people have for extensions and the ability to sync those extensions across multiple computers and portable installations, and you've got a force to be contended with.
Internet Explorer
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Windows
only: Internet Explorer still commands a healthy chunk of the browser
market, mostly because it ships with the most popular operating system
on Earth and fits, if not exactly elegantly, into corporate computer
plans. While many or most IE users stick with it for lack of wanting to
try something else, Lifehacker readers definitely don't fall into that
crowd—the majority of readers who voted in favor of Internet Explorer
are sporting Internet Explorer 8. By contrast, nearly 20 percent of
those surfing the web right now are using Internet Explorer 6, which had
its initial release in 2001. Version 8 could mark a resurgence for the
brand, though. It's the first version of Internet Explorer to have a
strong focus on web standards compliance, as well as increasing
rendering speed. And like Chrome, Internet Explorer 8 maintains a
separate process for each tab to increase stability and security.
Internet Explorer 8 has also beefed up its security measures from
previous versions, including active filtering against malicious
cross-site scripting and ActiveX isolation from the core of the browser.
Safari
Windows/Mac:
Safari is Apple's contribution to the web browsing world, built
originally to fit snugly inside OS X. Like Chrome, Safari runs the
speedy WebKit rendering engine for snappy page loads. In addition to its
WebKit core, Safari also has the Nitro JavaScript engine, which lays
claim to radically faster JavaScript execution than Internet Explorer
and Firefox (in its own testing reports, anyways). Safari sports Apple's
Cover Flow browser for perusing your history and bookmarks and an
eye-catching display of the top 24 sites you've visited as the default
page when Safari is loaded.
