Browsing the Browsers - A layman's view

Everyone who uses a device - whether it be a desktop or a laptop, a mobile phone or a tablet - to get at the internet uses a browser.  Forget about a standalone word processing program, or a spreadsheet tool or presentation software for productivity. Never mind separate files to download and store all your pictures and music and documents (of whatever shape or form) that you can happily use without going onto the internet.  Nowadays, all of it and much more besides, is handled by any web browser, both to create (I’m typing this on such a tool) and store or publish (as I will soon, hence your being able to read it). Cloud technology, it’s called, because all the data is held on a server - more correctly, hundreds of the things - in a location totally unknown to the user.  Along with crypto currencies and blockchain, it’s the Next Big Thing in the IT industry and has been growing quickly over the last few years now. But that’s all subject matter to write about another day.

This is not news, of course.  Even the least tech savvy user knows that, and I consider myself in this number.  I know how to use all this stuff, and set things up to my liking, but how it all works is frankly beyond me.  I don’t need to know any of it. My mind doesn’t work that way. Even the most simple and basic programming is out of my reach, despite spending nearly 20 years working for a leading banking software company where my job was to help banks, who had invested perhaps a couple of million bucks buying our system, to understand how to set it up and make it work.  But if any programming was needed all I could do was write down what was needed and how it was supposed to work and what it should look like then hand it over to some proper techies to write the code.  

Browsers, in my early experience, were simply tools to get onto the internet to read the day’s news (thus saving the cost of a newspaper which was often difficult to obtain in English in my usual work locations across the Middle East, Eastern Europe etc), check facts and information that I might need for work, and check flight information before travel.  In those days, round about the turn of the Millennium, your choices were very limited indeed. The choice was basically the browser that came with your ubiquitous Microsoft Windows package (that most people used) or for the more adventurous the one offered by Apple and that locked you firmly into their universe with no easy way out if you didn’t like something.  A disclaimer here: I have never in my life used an Apple computer, laptop or tablet. I had a second generation iPhone for a few years and liked it very much, but never used it for the internet - I used my Windows laptop (work supplied) for that. Eventually I dumped Apple and since then have used Android devices (a Sony Xperia and latterly a succession of Samsung Galaxy’s) but still use their built-in browsers relatively lightly.

When I left the software company and set up my own consultancy six years ago, I had to invest in my own laptop (a Lenovo W530 that I’m still using, perfectly happily) and that prompted me to have a look at what alternative browsers were out there.  So what follows is a summary, in no particular order, of the ones I’ve tried and used, some for extended periods, and some very lightly. I’ll describe the things I like about them, things that were less favourable, and the odd problem. And this is done on the basis of a purely basic user, someone who doesn’t want to do anything complex, simply surf and store or play stuff.

First up - the daddy of them all, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE).  When I first started using PCs and laptops (rather than mainframe computers) IE was the absolute standard and probably every user in the world (apart from the super-cool Apple fanboys) was locked into it.  I used probably three or four iterations as they were introduced and my firm updated the laptop operating systems through to Windows 7 Professional. They were all much of a muchness, and did what it said on the box - namely providing a reliable gateway to the World Wide Web.  The page load could be a bit slow, especially where I had two or three tabs open, but that may have been more down to memory issues with the various hardware I was using, or slow connection speeds through sometimes poor routers in office, airport lounge or home that found handling content heavy web pages just hard work.   There were, presumably, improvements with each browser release, but I was never really aware of them, and for what I wanted to do it was perfectly adequate.

IE was replaced in the Windows 10 release, which came in with Microsoft’s all singing and all dancing Edge browser.  So when I upgraded from 7 to 10 (the free upgrade that Microsoft offered to launch both the operating system and Edge) I got it, with IE still available as an alternative.  I moved over to Edge as I was able to move across all my Favourite sites and passwords and so on very easily. From memory new versions of IE, as they came in, didn’t need this so it came as news to me that you could automatically transfer it all without having to copy them over manually.  I’ve always found Edge to be very good - it’s clean to look at it, easy to use and has some nice functions allowing you to save articles in a file to read later, annotate and share items and so on that I have never found a need to use. Adding Favourites lists to categorise your frequent sites is again simple and efficient.  The main issue I’ve had (and continue to have) is the adverts that are always there, flashing away constantly on every page you go to, and automatically opening while I’m trying to read the football report or something, forcing me to scroll back up or down to get back to where I was. Ad Blocking tools, whether the browser’s own or third party software, never seem to work properly and I can never completely get rid of them.  It’s an irritant rather than a major problem, and you get used to it eventually (or at least I did).  

But for some reason I’ve never really understood, Edge has never really taken off and I’ve read more critical articles about it than ones praising it.  It always seems to lag close to or at the bottom of any Best Browser list in the tech magazines and surveys (usually in a race with IE for the wooden spoon).  Maybe people just don’t like Microsoft products any more. For me, however, Edge is a perfectly good browser, and I keep my one up-to-date as and when I add or change a Favourite or password.  Is it the best out there? Probably not, but it’s still perfectly adequate for the average non-technical user like me. Maybe when it’s rebuilt from the ground up and based on Google’s Chromium operating system (as many other browsers are) it will improve and feature many more knobs and whistles that today’s users seem to want and pick up market share.  It’s due in I think early 2020, so we’ll soon see.

Recently I tried Opera.  I had read about it some time ago, but it didn’t seem to offer much that other browsers don’t, but I stumbled across a Best of… survey last week that gave it a much higher rating, and amongst the new functionality baked in the latest release is its own VPN.   Now given that most people, including me, are a lot more security conscious, after the way personal data was harvested and used to influence the 2016 EU Referendum in Britain and the US Presidential Election in the same year, anything that makes it harder to be tracked and harvested seems worthwhile, so I gave it a go.  

It’s a nice enough browser, and offered a lot of customisation possibilities - a couple of nice looking Pink Floyd skins were offered for instance.  It also had a side-bar to the left that held various icons (for instance the Settings shortcut) to different functions, including short cuts to both WhatsApp and Messenger.  Since they are both part of FACEBOOK (what is the point of this re-branding, Zuck?) these days, I can’t really see the need for both, either on a computer or a mobile device - I’d be very surprised if both were in existence this time next year.  There were so many set up options it took a while to get the thing how I wanted, what with importing Favourites, choosing backgrounds and so on, but it was ok. I used WhatsApp quite happily, and the multiple tab searching and normal stuff worked just fine.  

But that VPN wasn’t what I had expected - for a start, it drastically slowed down page load times, much more than I had expected.  It was also not possible to set a server location - for instance Asia, Europe etc - for the VPN to use, and most of the time it seemed to me to be automatically selecting a server somewhere in Russia (given the propensity for cookie acceptance requests to be in Cyrillic script even if the site was a UK retailer).  Now since Russia and China are proven to be highly sophisticated fake news exponents (the troll farms Russia used in their 2016 influencing campaigns seem to be very effective) it seemed to me that a VPN that apparently favoured Russia is not one I wanted to use - and apologies if that remark insults anyone. I uninstalled Opera after less than two days.  It’s not for me.

In terms of complex set up, it reminded me very much of Mozilla’s Firefox, the go-to browser if you don’t want to be locked into the Microsoft, Google or Apple ecosystems and value privacy and flexibility.  I’ve tried it a few times over the years, and found it decent. The set up offers incredible flexibility using a whole catalogue of add-ons to do different things, including a huge range of skins, a variety of ad-blockers, and tool-kits to manipulate searches and other functions.  I’ve loaded it, set it up and used it for a while and been happy enough - it no doubt looks good and has fast page loads, and you can use many tabs simultaneously with no appreciable drag. But sometimes for reasons I can’t figure out at all, it all seems to get a bit confused and you get passwords lost or overwritten.  I’ve scrapped a couple of iterations and gone elsewhere, and each time, when I’ve decided to give it another go, when I’ve re-installed, it’s picked up the last lot of settings and automatically applied them, password errors and all. But it only adds another 30 minutes or so updating those and you’re good to go - at least until the next time. 

I did that earlier this year, and worked with it happily enough as my default, with Edge as the alternative.  But this week I found that, for some reason, the browser’s Sync functionality had stopped and I tried to kick it off through the Settings menu.  It sent a message with an activation code to my e-mail address - but I found I had defined that incorrectly in my Firefox account set up so the mail was not reaching me.  I tried to correct it, but the directions given merely took me into a loop that resulted in the mails being sent to the bad address again. I sent a mail to the Help team, and got a standard mail back telling me what options I could try (basically what I had already done).  So it’s stuck. I can use it, but with Sync not working I’m probably not getting the regular updates and any password changes will equally be lost.  

So I’ve now gone back to everyone’s favourite, the world’s Most Popular Browser, Google Chrome.  I’ve used it on and off for years, and I can quite understand why that is the case.  It’s quick and clean, like Opera, like Firefox and everything else, with loads of extensions and customisation options.  It’s fast and secure, and once you’ve set it up initially, after an Uninstall it restores everything when you re-load (as I’ve done two or three times).  It comes with all the Google tools and services as standard, and since I have a couple of gmail accounts, and my photos and music library are in the related apps it has everything I need.  Talking of my Google Photos and Music, I have the content also saved in competing Microsoft services that came with Windows 10 and I can say with absolutely no doubt that Google’s are so much better.  I understand the data concerns, but it seems to me that after many years of use, before those concerns were recognised by anybody, there is not much about me that Google - and for that matter Facebook or Amazon or whoever - don’t already know, and even less that I can do about it.  So there is no point worrying about it, in my view.

The only problem I’ve come across is that if you have a lot of tabs open, there can be a performance lag.  At one point I had Chrome set up to launch with about 6 tabs defined, all bar one of which had passwords to apply.  The system did it all flawlessly if a little slowly (but still much much quicker than launching and signing in each one manually).  Thereafter leaving them all open and signed in all the time made the working day a lot easier, but I found that there was sometimes an appreciable lag opening a document, or a mail, or another tab - the browser configured in that way was clearly resource heavy.  I haven’t done that this time, and it seems appreciably quicker.

So there you go.  This is not a comprehensive review because there are browsers, some new and some older, that I just haven’t tried and don’t really see a need to do so in my retirement.  It’s also not including in CPU use statistics or technical information because the average Joe Public user (like me) isn’t really interested in all that stuff - it’s for geeks.  This post is simply not aimed at techies (who no doubt have all that information and much else in any case).   

I expect I’ll continue using Chrome, with Edge as my fallback, for the foreseeable future.  I still have Firefox installed and may need to dip into it now and again - and at some point I’ll probably do an Uninstall on it. .  

I’d be interested to see what you think - are you a Chrome man or a dyed-in-the-wool Firefox advocate?  Was my Opera experience unique? Why is Edge still so unpopular and will it ever improve its fortunes? Are there any Apple users who can tell me why it remains so popular?

Comment is free - I’d love to hear from you in the space provided.