News reaches us in the ivory library tower that Firefox (in Europe at least) has finally overtaken Internet Explorer. Statcounter shows that in December 2010, in Europe, Fifefox pushed Microsoft’s offering into second place.
However, more and more people are getting interested in Google’s Chrome, especially now that the Chrome Web Store offers so many extensions, plug ins and tweaks, some of which really add enormously to the original function. Many people use a different browser for different tasks – Google Apps do run very nicely in Chrome after all (big surprise !) and the Uni Web Mail powered by Microsoft Exchange is a bit disappointing in anything other than IE (big surprise again !).
So, which browser are you currently using to access things ? Are you using more than one ? What do you use for what ?
Right now, catching up with my reading (that's Scholarship if my HoD is reading), it's Chrome. It's fast, stable, and the most convenient for general browsing.
Firefox is my power house browser: it has better extensions for curating, writing, web development, and Blackboard course building. But each extension makes it slower to start up.
Chrome is catching up, extension wise, but there's a way to go yet.
As an occasional web developer, it's worth knowing that Chrome and Firefox have different HTML rendering engines — respectively WebKit and Gecko — so they're good for testing cross-browser support of web sites. Chrome and Firefox, along with Safari (which has the same rendering engine as Chrome) and Opera, are also the only browsers with native support for HTML5 at the moment.