Mashed Articles

Which pair of trousers is best? If you’re a young hipster you might covet a pair of skinny black jeans. Slouching into middle age, you may crave something a little roomier. It’s the same with web browsers – one size doesn’t fit all.

Opera will be best option for some users, while Firefox will be the client of choice for others. There’s even a place for Internet Explorer.

But what if you don’t know how these applications stack up against each other? That’s where we come in. We’ve been using the web since the very beginning, accessing it with a procession of evolving browsers. We’ve discovered that some are best for casual use, others are better for development and others for design. We’ve poured that hard- won knowledge into this article, so you can pick the browser that’s best for you without fuss.

Chrome Developer Tools strongest feature is the ability to track the load of resources as they’re rendered. Invaluable for SEO and troubleshooting.

Best for browsing

Browser zealots may well cry sacrilege, but for the web-browsing everyman, Internet Explorer is the best option. If you’re logging into Hotmail, checking out train times or even banking online, you’ll find that, rightly or wrongly, many useful sites are still highly optimised for Microsoft’s bundled browser – and for understandable reasons.

The web – and Internet Explorer itself – may be marching on towards the standards-compliant utopia envisaged by the W3C, but there’s still a lot of old code out there. A lot of committee-designed websites rely on proprietary elements supported by Internet Explorer only, and getting rid of those frameworks takes time, money and resources. At PC Plus, we juggle several browsers throughout the day (for reasons that will become clear in this article), but we still encounter high-profile sites that won’t run in anything but Internet Explorer.

Best for extra features

We think IE 9’s poor reputation among the computer cognoscenti isn’t entirely deserved, and derives mainly from Internet Explorer 6. At a time when other browsers had retreated from the wars and gone back to basics like meeting web standards and improving page rendering, IE6 continued down the proprietary DHTML route in its client-side scripting support and had a risible implementation of CSS 2.

It was ubiquitous for years, shipping with Windows XP, but Internet Explorer 8 marked a warming towards web standards that’s continuing with Internet Explorer 9 – including cool stuff like WOFF-standard web fonts.

Microsoft has long used Internet Explorer as a springboard for new ideas. Hootsuite to come to the fore. Accelerators like Inline Search make browsing a more integrated experience.

IE9 also includes browsing features no other client can offer – Web Slices and Inline Search being our favourites. The former is underused in the development community. It lets users subscribe to sections of content in a page – a feature powered by standards-compliant microformats.

Best for web designers

Firefox has lost fans of late, and has been accused of becoming bloated with bolted-on features like Internet Explorer, but we still think it’s the best browser a web designer can have. Unlike IE, it’s cross platform between Mac, Windows and Linux, which is essential in multi-machine design environments. It’s robust and fast, based on community-built, standards-compliant JavaScript and page rendering engines that compete well with upstarts like WebKit-based Chrome and Safari.

We love Firefox’s extensibility most. Chrome and Internet Explorer do plugins too, but Firefox is unbeatable in this department. Many of its addons are dedicated to design use.

Firefox remains the web’s most extensible browser. There are so many design addons available, it can become your main web-authoring tool.

For example, ColourZilla lets you sample colour from anywhere in a page. The colour HEX code readings can then be pasted directly into your text editor. Pixel Perfect works with developer tool FireBug to add design features and tracing image capability to your browser. Our favourite Firefox plugin is IE Tab 2. It lets you preview your pages using Internet Explorer’s rendering engine without having to leave Firefox. It’s also available for Chrome.

Best for developers

You could easily argue that Firefox is the best choice for developers too. When it’s loaded with plugins like Codetch, Aardvark and Web Developer – plugins that let you use Firefox as an IDE – that’s very true, but with nothing added, Chrome is our nomination for the best browser for developers.

When you’re writing web code, speed and standards are key. Chrome is lightweight despite reaching version 11, and because it’s based on WebKit, it’s one of the most standards-compliant browsers. It’s the built-in Developer Tools that swing it for us, though. Hit [Ctrl]+[Shift]+[I] to launch a dedicated console on any page that not only lets you view its source, but also see and live-edit HTML and CSS.

You can open and look at the DOM (Document Object Model) of a page in a hierarchical view, which makes it easier to track down and target elements in your code. You can even speed-audit your pages, looking at how fast various resources are obtained and rendered, letting you create optimised and streamlined sites – and that’s before we’ve looked at the dedicated JavaScript console.

Best for online services

If you rely on tools like Google Docs, DropBox and Remember the Milk, Google Chrome is the browser for you. Though Firefox 4 debuted with a more streamlined interface, it still can’t quite beat Chrome, whose tab placement has now been copied by every major browser.

Chrome’s feature set seals the deal for us. First, it loves JavaScript and AJAX, the foundation of so many cloud apps. The V8 script engine – dubbed Crankshaft in the latest version – is the fastest online (though engaged in a battle of one-upmanship with SpiderMonkey, Mozilla’s script engine). Added to some of the strongest CSS3 and HTML5 support in any browser, standards-compliant cloud apps in Chrome are fast and stable.

If you want your browser to be invisible as you use tools like Flickr, Chrome is ideal. In fullscreen mode it simply disappears from view.

We love Chrome’s interface too. Its Bookmarks Bar lets you place buttons for frequently used services within easy reach. Finally, its fullscreen mode is truly, instantly fullscreen. Hit [F11] for a page view with no scrollbars, menus, buttons, chrome or browser icons. It’s ideal for distraction-free writing in SimpleText, or using Avery’s suite of creative tools.

This feature is taken from PC Plus Issue 311 – on sale now. To view the expanded feature, as well as more fantastic articles, tutorials and reviews, click here to buy the digital version of PC Plus issue 311 now. You can also subscribe to PC Plus or buy PC Plus Magazine back issues.