EXCLUSIVES

WEB BROWSER

Words by Allen Kelly

Browsers are something many people don’t put a lot of thought into. Unless you’re an Internet junkie, email and surfing can be done easily through any browser. But web browsers are quickly becoming the most important application in your computer. With its increasing importance, applications have begun to offer more choices when it comes to displaying web pages. OS X includes Safari as part of its package, so one would think: “Is there really a point to downloading a third-party browser?”

The answer is a definite yes, for a number of reasons. Our nominees for this category were scrutinized for productivity improvements, such as bookmarking, tabbed browsing, as well as the integration of such tools as Really Simple Syndication (RSS), and extensibility. Although testing browsers is difficult, as almost everyone has different Internet habits and requirements, we tested our engines on a wide range of websites ranging from the visual-lacking text-based sites, to banking and finance sites, and to gaming sites that rely heavily on Flash and Java.

All browsers coped well with the latter, as these technologies have become standardized in recent years. Sites for banking and finance proved to hold more of a challenge because we were testing on a Mac, and many sites expressed a preference on the opening page for Internet Explorer.

The young Shiira deserves a mention for pointing out the route that Safari might take in the future, especially in the innovative use of Exposé-like tools for accessing multiple tabs. It has real potential, and it’s free.

Firefox was started with the intention of taking the best of the Mozilla browser suite and stripping it back to create a small, fast browser equally at home on any of the main operating systems. Despite its occasional departure from OS X’s way of working, Firefox offers the best combination of speed, stability, features and extensibility. Its growing popularity across all three main computer platforms also means it has gained supports from most entities in the financial and banking institutions. Although Safari has introduced some good RSS facilities, they don’t compare to the elegant way Firefox manages bookmarking sources and accessing stories. The Mozilla-based project also has little known features such as integrated page searching, multiple home pages, and great features for habitual bloggers. Firefox users also have access to a range of toolbar options from popular companies such a Yahoo! and Google, which can improve the browsing experience altogether.

The only downside is that Firefox lacks some integration options, so you’ll need to assess how important these are and whether the facilities can be replaced with Firefox’s themes and extensions.
Firefox is also free, it is online-banking enabled, has tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking features, custom stylesheets, themes, in-page search, UAS spoofing, Java integration and RSS support. It is a stable browser with a ton of exciting features for general users, it’s a great replacement for Safari.

The iWard goes to Firefox.