The Browser Saga of the Internetaholic

As you all can see by the blog title itself I spend a lot of time on the web. And what’s the most important application to an internetaholic? Yep. You got it. The web browser. Usually my favourite and my default web browser is Mozilla Firefox (What else would it be? IE? I think not.)

Anyway, I choose Firefox because of a lot of reasons. The most important one being the huge library of add-ons for it. Ad block Plus, FlashGot, Firebug, X Marks (Previously Foxmarks), TwitterFox, Delicious Bookmarks and a whole lot more of other geeky stuff you wouldn’t really be interested in . I’m also writing this blog post on another Firefox add-on by the way. It’s ScribeFire. (Thanks to Shaakunthala for the tip). It’s more like a whole application platform than just a web browser. And it has the greatest download manager integration with FlashGot add-on and I’ve never wavered from Firefox for . . . well never.

But even with all this Firefox is not without its drawbacks. It’s one of the worst memory hogs in my PC.As I’m running the web browser all day long it sometimes takes around 700MB of memory. That’s a hell of a lot even for a browser. (Well all this add-ons I’ve installed must take their fair share, I admit. But still. . . ). And it’s slooooow. It takes its own time to start up (Which is another reason it rarely gets closed) and page rendering is somewhat slower than its competitors. (Once again, I don’t even count IE as a competitor. It’s popularity is purely based on Microsoft bundling it with Windows. Most people don’t even know they have alternatives.)

But this doesn’t leave me from trying out other browsers. Sometime back I tried Google Chrome. Several times from the beta stage to Chrome official releases and developer builds. It’s the fastest browser around these days and has some really cool features. But somehow it doesn’t seem to work for me at all. I’ve experienced a lot of crashes and other bugs with it and I’ve lost my taste for it since. It never should have left the beta stage in my opinion (Hey! It’s MY opinion in MY blog. You can belive whatever you wish ).

So, to the point now. The reason I started writing this post is I downloaded the new Safari 4.0 Beta from Apple today. (Yes yes, I know. It’s been a couple of months since its out. But its new for me). Safari is one of the fastest browsers out there, second only to Chrome. Apple has added some new features since Safari 3 and most of its eye candy (Yummy!) it seems. Anyways, check out the new home screen. Looks cooool. It’ll learn which pages you most visit and display them for quick access as soon as you open a new tab. (Hmm… Sounds familiar. Where have I seen that before? )

Another major change that’s immediately visible is the positioning of the tabs. It’s moved to the top of the window leaving more space for actual browsing. (I have the strangest feeling that all this sounds vaguely familiar again.) While this might be a change for the good for Mac OS X users, for Vista and Windows 7 users the transparent tabs can be kind of irritating. Take a look and decide for yourself.

And it seems like Apple’s cover flip has made its way into Safari too. The book marks and history view is now very cool. (Why anyone would actually want it there is a completely different matter). And I have to mention here. The lack of the Ctrl + H shortcut key to get into the history view is very very irritating. I keep pressing it and nothing happens. Here’s the cover flip view.

And it looks like the private browsing feature (AKA Incognito more in Chrome) has made its way into Safari too. I don’t really remember if this was available in Safari 3 so somebody correct me if I am wrong.

Well that’s it. I’ve tried the new Safari beta. Just now Kalinga posted a tweet about the new Chrome developer build. (Hmm. Should I try that and waste more time?). Leave your comments about your favourite browser and why you like it. Or why you like or don’t like this post . Cheers!!!