Top 5 best browsers.

Browser comparison: How the five leaders stack up in speed, ease of use and more..

The best browser for your desktop could be one you’re not using. Whether Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, or Safari is your current choice, our tests found distinct differences in speed and ease of use. Also compared was how each browser uses system resources, a near-invisible trait that could be discreetly bogging down your PC. For the online lifestyle, the right browser could save you time and frustration.

How they run

Browsers largely look and act the same: They render HTML in multiple tabs or separate windows, let you bookmark pages, support HTTP and FTP file transfer, or offer private browsing (no data is stored). Deep inside each one, however, are operational differences that may or may not fulfill your needs.
Opera had a long-standing and well-deserved reputation for being fast, but not rendering all pages correctly. A switch from a proprietary HTML layout engine to free and widely-used WebKit (currently version 537 as with Chrome) has made that a thing of the past.
Internet Explorer has a history of being exploited by bad guys, both because of its immense popularity and its ActiveX technology. Give Microsoft credit: It’s doggedly improved the Trident layout engine, adopted standards, and improved security. IE is no longer something I advise users to avoid.
Firefox is a longtime worthy IE competitor, and Chrome’s a strong newcomer. As Safari was installed with iTunes for years, many Windows users have it, but have never tried it—possibly because Apple has never given it a truly Windows-like look.
Comparing browser performance and resource usage as well as features and ease of use.

Chrome 36 (WebKit 537): Stable and speedy

Chrome is fast and generally reliable. Recently, it revealed a propensity for playing the video and audio portion of some popup windows without actually showing the popup.

Firefox 31 (Gecko): Looking good, running fast. 

The memory leak in its Gecko rendering engine seems to be gone and Firefox has recently received an upgrade that was radical enough to rile a few longtime users. (There is a way to bring back the old-style menus.)Firefox is the long-time competitor to IE that staved off a Microsoft browser monopoly for years until Chrome showed up. It’s fast and very reliable. Despite a longstanding memory leak that forced the occasional restart.

Internet Explorer 11 (Trident)

Internet Explorer remains the most widely distributed browser, and the one most targeted by malware. IE remains extremely popular and useful—if for nothing else that downloading your browser of choice with a fresh install of Windows. It’s decently fast with HTML, exceptionally fast with Javascript, and renders pages reliably.

Opera 23 (WebKit 537)

Opera is worth a look for its easy configuration. After a long, dark age of badly rendered pages, Opera’s now near-perfect in that regard. After uninstalling it just a few months ago due to its incompatibility with PCWorld's own web tools. Updates have smoothed out those kinks, and it's only a hair slower than Chrome. Unlike Chrome and Firefox, Opera 23 doesn’t suffer invisible popups. It does use the same Webkit engine and run as multiple processes, and it's more difficult to shut down. It also lacks a home button, instead relying solely on a launch page of oft-used sites (Speed Dial).
For HTML rendering, Opera was only a hair slower than first-place Chrome, scoring 5625 on BrowserMark and 5447 in Peacekeeper. It was a hair faster with Javascript, completing the Sunspider test in 150.1ms. Overall, you’d be hard-pressed to notice the difference between the two WekKit 537-based browsers in a hands-on.

Safari 5.1.17 (WebKit 534)

Though king on the Mac, Safari is probably the least popular of the top browsers under Windows—a bit sad as it’s competent, easy to use, and light on the memory profile. Apple apparently ceased supporting Windows as of version 5.1.17, but we tested it anyway because of its thrifty use of memory.

July 14, 2015

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