What is the Best Browser for a PC?

A web browser is an application that accesses resources on the World Wide Web such as a web page, image or video and presents them to the user. Users typically use hyperlinks to navigate from one resource to the next. Many browsers have been in use over the years, although a few browsers account for the great majority of use. Factors that determine what the best browser is include the interface, privacy, security and support for standards. Popular Internet browsers include Internet Explorer, Firefox and Google Chrome.

Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer is a series of web browsers that Microsoft has been developing since 1995. It's one of the most widely used browsers, reaching its peak usage in 2002 with at least 95 percent of all Internet users. Internet Explorer's usage share since then has declined slightly since then due to other browsers such as Firefox and Google Chrome.

Internet Explorer 7 includes the use of internationalized domain names beginning with version, which allows it to use web sites with non-Latin characters. Internet Explorer 8 was the first version of this browser to support 32 and 64-bit architectures and Internet Explorer 9 was the first version to take advantage of hardware acceleration to improve performance. Internet Explorer version 10 is the latest version as of 2013, which receives further improvements in standards support.

Firefox

Mozilla Firefox is a browser for multiple operating systems such as Linux, OS X and Windows. This browser is also available for Android, an operating system for mobile devices. Firefox has at least 20 percent of the web browser usage as of 2012.

Firefox uses many web standards such as the following:

• HTML4
• MathML
• DOM
• SVG 1.1
• XHTML
• XML
• XSLT

This browser is currently at version 22 and has been in compliance with the Acid2 standard since version 3.0. All subsequent versions of Firefox have scored 100 out of possible 100 points on the Acid test. Firefox also uses "Safe Browsing," which is a proprietary protocol that Google uses to exchange data on malware protection with other software manufacturers.

Google Chrome

Google uses WebKit to develop Chrome, using the WebKit layout engine for versions prior to version 28 and the WebKit fork Blink for subsequent versions. Chrome has been available as a stable release since late 2008 and Net Application currently shows Chrome in third place for number of users, while StatCounter places it in first place. Google tests Chrome internally with unit testing in addition to WebKit's layout tests. It also tests Chrome against the Google index for many web sites with high traffic. Google initially created Gears to add features to Chrome, although it now relies on HTML5 for this purpose.

As far as who has the best browser, Internet Explorer has been out of the running for quite some time. Since Google Chrome has been released, it has grown significantly in popularity for ease of use. Because of this, Firefox has stepped up its game to produce a faster, more effective browser. Either Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox web browser are extremely powerful and easy to use. Until the next major browser update, you’ll be very satisfied with either of these.