Jalaj P. Jha Technical & Miscellaneous Ramblings

Which Browser(s) do You Use?

If your answer to me for this question is "Only IE", it would not surprise me at all. Many people still go for the default installed browser and that's why Internet Explorer has still 54.5% marketshare as of Feb 2010 (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers). A couple of years back I too was like one of you using only IE4-6 until I banged my head hard to understand what the buzz around Yahoo Pipes was! Each time I opened Yahoo Pipes in IE, whatever showed up never ever made any sense to me. Fallen in love with IE, I even kept ignoring the warning message about version not supported that showed up on each of my attempt. And when I started it on Firefox the whole interface came up fine and then onwards I stopped using IE, for Yahoo Pipes that is.

Did you think that Firefox was powerful than IE! Right?? Well everyone has his own shortcomings and strengths and this applies to Browsers too... I though have been downloading Firefox since it's 1.5 version (or earlier maybe!) but didn't use it because of shortcomings in it. Yes Firefox too had/has shortcomings, for example FF took more time to load/start, and IE version below 7 opened even in Explorer/folder-listing windows, FF didn't support Embedded OpenType fonts which I used to make multilingual sites (unicode was not much popular then) etc..

Then as Firefox and Internet Explorer were not enough, I started using Safari & Opera with Opera becoming my most used browser. For Safari I always appreciated its anti-aliased page output. When Chrome made its appearance, it became my default browser in the very first week, for It starts up really fast and loads javascript intensive sites as Yahoo pipes, gmail etc very fast. So as of now list of browsers I use is as below ordered in decreasing order of usage.

1. Chrome
2. Firefox
3. Internet Explorer
4. Opera
5. Safari

Why would anyone want to use multiple browsers? Well there may be many reasons, the reasons that applies for me are

1. What if you have multiple gmail accounts and need to check them regularly? For a single browser only option is to sign-in for first account, check mail, log-off, sign-in for second.. and so on... If you have multiple browsers, sign-in to different accounts in each browser, checking "remember me" option and keep on using it for weeks before signing-in again. This is one of most important reason for me to use multiple browsers
2. Chrome is fast, faster than any other browser so is my first choice now.
3. When chrome first appeared, it did not support plug-ins so till to date I don't use any plugins but I do have two on Firefox one of which is DownloadHelper to download videos off youtube. Secondly when you open a RSS url in Firefox you see formatted entries instead of raw xml (chrome mostly fails here!)
4. For IE RSS rendering is even more evolved one, where you can filter items based on tags or sort them etc.
5. For opera I like the fast-open shortcuts (ctrl+1 to 9), I guess FF may too have implemented it but I never used it anywhere else.
6. For Safari, well as I already said once before it's rendering is quite good.
7. As a developer I need to ensure that my code works fine across all/most browsers, so having multiple browsers is a must.

Cartoonist Caldwell Tanner of College Humor suggests that web browsers can be compared to modes of transportation.

It says

• Firefox : Fairly well-rounded, but nearly unusable because of all its stupid add-ons.
• Internet Explorer : Worthless, but good for occasional bashing.
• Safari : While very efficient, its quality is vastly exaggerated y the people that use it.
• Opera : Some people really love it, everyone else just thinks it looks f*cking stupid.
• Chrome : Very fast. That's about it.

Oh! now I repeat! Which browsers do you use? Eager to hear from you!!