The web-browser experience

Six years back I was introduced to Internet. It was a dial-up connection which he had subscribed to and it was slow but it was a window which was opening a world of opportunities to us. We could actually look into another world. The first step was to get an online identity in the form of an email address. I still cherish that email account to this day.

A lot has changed about Internet since then. But one thing that has not changed is the window. This software which let us peek into the virtual world big as the real world was the web-browser. It worked with accepting the name of the website and thus taking us to it.

The first web-browser that I was introduced to was Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. It came by default and it was an obvious choice. For a lot of years I used Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, updated it, upgraded it, uninstalled it and re-installed it, but never changed it, till last year. There was certain hoopla among my friends regarding this new web-browser called Mozilla Firefox. They had tried it and liked it. I was tempted to try it out after getting rave reviews about it from them.

Since those days, it had been 1 year and I have used Mozilla Firefox as well as Opera Web-browser. Although I have liked working with both of them and I have heard a huge support in the form of thousands of downloads, I would still like to tell my non-technical friends about the best things that, I think, each web-browser of the three named Micrsoft’s Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Opera’s Web browser has to offer.

Mozilla Firefox has one very special feature that Internet Explorer till its version 6 does not have. And that is tabbed browsing. You can open a single window and open multiple tabs inside that single window with each tab displaying a different website. This gives me the ease of minimizing, maximizing and closing all the open websites with a single click. Built-in pop up blocker is another feature that is very effective thus impressive about Mozilla Firefox. We all are always bugged by these unsolicited annoying windows opening on the screen which hamper the efficiency and productivity. Another thing that is impressive about Mozilla Firefox is the size of its setup file. It is just 33% the size of a typical Internet Explorer setup file.

Although Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is a bit intimidating when it comes to the size of its setup file but the most intriguing thing about Internet Explorer is its speed. No matter how light Firefox is, I have always found IE to load faster on my Windows system. After a certain threshold of number of tabs, Firefox seems to consume huge amounts of memory. Also, maximum number of websites seems to support Internet Explorer. It has happened quite a few times that a certain site which is not opening in my Firefox (which is my default web-browser) opens when I try to open it through Internet Explorer.

The best thing about Opera’s web browser for Windows is that it can successful render a WAP site. Neither Firefox nor Internet Explorer has integrated this support in their web browsers till the writing of this article. Other than this, Opera has nearly all the features that I listed for Firefox including tabbed browsing.

I have set Mozilla Firefox as my default web browser and the reasons are obvious. I like the features that it has to offer and it makes my web experience a better experience. I would just hope that the Mozilla guys do something about the memory consumption part. Other than this I would like to suggest users to try what other web browsers have to offer.