Fluff from the naval of my mind

Like most ‘wars’ the browser war involves no death and destruction, only land grabbing and sabre rattling.

I use several browsers and offer unquestioning fealty to none. I introduce new browsers to the fold when they offer some significant feature or improvement over my existing harem. The two I use most often are Safari (because I’m a Mac user and, like it or not, Safari offers greater integration with the rest of the system than other browsers) and Firefox (because it offers such a good range of plugins).

I use Safari for day to day browsing. The integration with things like DevonThink (which I use for information management) means grabbing and organising URLs, web pages and snippets is a snap. Safari works perfectly well for 99% of my browsing needs.

I use Firefox for most work related activity simply because I use is on my Linux machines and Mac, and it is set up on each of these machines with all my work related bookmarks and plugins to help with various activities.

I user Internet Explorer in the Windows virtual machines I use for product development mainly to check web sites are compatible with the main browser used by the majority of internet users.

I have yet to try Chrome simply because I have no compelling reason to install it and although Opera is an excellent browser (I used it many years ago before Firefox took off) I, once again, see no compelling reason to change.

“Which browser is best?”, is a foolish question. It’s like saying, “which form of transport is best?”. It depends on your needs. If I wish to cross town I may use a bicycle. If I want to travel to London for work I use a train. If crossing the to New York for a weekend, I use an airplane. Any blanket statement that “form of transport X is best”, is plain silly and the same applies to browsers.