The Straight Dope
With all due respect to diehard Firefox fans, the spunky browser is no longer our favorite vehicle for surfing the web. That distinction now belongs to Chrome, the sleekest and fastest browser available. Our primary gripe with Chrome in our last browser roundup two years ago was that it didn’t support hardware acceleration without mucking around with secret code. That’s long been addressed and our only lingering concern is that Google may cater to advertisers a bit too much, hence it being the last of the major browsers to implement Do Not Track technology, which still isn’t turned on by default.We also have to give props to Microsoft for its work with Internet Explorer 11. If you’re rocking a touchscreen in Windows 8/8.1, you may prefer to use IE11 over Chrome simply because it’s better suited for touch navigation. It’s also fast, though we’re calling shenanigans on Microsoft’s own tech demos, which seem to heavily favor its own browser over the competition, even though others also boast GPU acceleration. Still, it’s the best version of IE yet, and we especially like the side-by-side browsing feature when launching the browser from the Start screen.
Where does that leave the others? Firefox is still a great browser with a rich catalog of extensions, and Opera is one to keep an eye on now that it shares DNA with Chrome. That leaves Safari as the odd man out, a decision Apple ultimately made for the masses by discontinuing support for Windows.
Note: This article was originally featured in the December 2013 issue of the magazine.
~ Paul Lilly
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