The great thing about web browsers is they are all free and in reality you can load as many as you want on whatever operating system you choose. Recently though we had Internet Explorer V9 released to the world, we had Firefox V4 RC and finally Chrome is at Version 10 I think. You can scour the web and find benchmarks and these shows (Depending on which site they used to test them) that <insert browser name here> is the best. I want to explore this from my own personal view point, both in a work situation and at home and show that indeed, there is not one clear winner.

At work

Having tried all of them at work, the one that works best there is in fact internet explorer. The reason why this pans out is pretty simple – the web developers and companies that write front end have to target something and as Internet explorer is installed on every single work machine, why not aim at that slice of the market and of course use Silverlight for the fancy bells and whistles. Firefox works just as good I may add to a degree but Chrome starts to fall down badly here and let us not forget that we will make sure people cannot go around installing whatever they want on a company machine.

At Home

The majority of the sites that I visit at home feature two things here, one been Adobe Flash (Streaming sites, YouTube and such) and Adverts. Now I do not mind the odd advert on a page but when it starts coming up in front of what your doing, then it is time to kill it off. Chrome tries ever so hard to get rid of adverts but it fails, the only good thing about chrome is it is fast to load. IE9 looks and moves fast now but it still retains no adblocker and when I click a link I do not want to open a new browser.

The Bottom line here then after trying various browsers at home is I stick with Firefox 4 RC, which is still fast, just a bit slow to load but has the ability for me to skin it to my taste, add in various plug-ins to make it do what I want to do and of course not crash.

Talking of crashing

The only time I have seen a browser crash of sorts was Google chrome which told me flash had crashed and I had to restart the whole thing anyhow. People seem to worry that one tab crashed will kill the whole browser but I have nothing on my tab’s that cannot be reloaded without issues anyhow – so who care?

Bottom Line

As I said at the start, try them all on the sites you go on and not this 5 minutes, load up a few sites, say that its crap and revert – no. Use the browser for one Week, do what your normally do and choose the one which YOU like, do not worry if your friend says its crap, what do they know right?

I need to state here that websites need adverts, they use this as a mean to get money which in turn helps pay for the time and effort they put into producing the goods. Static adverts I can live with and even sometimes they show me something I might want to buy and all is good but when a site (mostly the video streaming sites) start to push adverts down your throat and they are loud and annoying and repeat over and over on each new page you go to – this is when you as a person need to take a stand.

While I Love the way Google Chrome works, there is just too many things that make me want to jump ship back to Firefox such as Adverts, flash slowing down the browser, my NAS box not working properly via Chrome and so forth. I have given the latest Firefox 4 Beta 12 a run and added a couple of extension and I will document how  it is working out for me so far.

Firefox 4 Beta 12

Firefox got slow and clunky and I honeslty started to hate this as much as using internet explorer to be honest but it did have some good points such as extensions. Version4 Beta 12 adds a few much needed features such as search from the address bar, menu now a drop down and much faster.

Adblock and Ghostery

The one extension that is almost a must is Adblock this manages to strip out most if not all the adverts present on the web including the ones that are present in videos and streaming type pages (as above). The other addon which is worth mentioning is Ghostery and this also blocks out items that are hidden.

As you can see from Justin.TV – it sensed and blocked Comescore Beacon, Google Adsense & Analytics, media6 and Quantcast. These not only track you but also can slow you down – combined with adblock and I would be surprised if any adverts come up every again.

If we are to compare Google Chrome using also Adblock (by the same person) – while there is not as many adverts littered about the place, I still get an annoying 30 second advert for Bulletstorm – this is both loud and annoying and if I refresh the stream, I get it again and again.

It seems that Firefox 4 which was planned to be released in February has once again been delayed. There is talk of a Beta 13 coming out and they say that they have got the bugs down to 15 now. Beta 12 was scheduled for a Beta build late last week, but that slipped to Tuesday night. Now Mozilla says that the code will sit there for a “couple days ” and wait for patches. The current bug count is 15 (at the time of this writing) which is down 7 from 24 hours ago, but up 1 from 72 hours ago.

Earlier this week, Mozilla’s Christian Legnitto told Mozilla developers that Beta 12 is likely to be the last beta, but he wouldn’t rule out a Beta 13. It turns out there will be a beta 13, as pre-Beta 13 builds surfaced on Mozilla’s FTP server. This indicates that Mozilla will miss the RC release target of February. At this point, a March release for the final seems to be almost too optimistic as well.

There is a good choice of browsers that you can choose from and many people swear blind that Google chrome is the only one to use – period. For example at work while I tried all of the browsers, in the end I actually stuck with Internet explorer 8 as all the in-house applications work properly with this. Now for a little while, I was back to Chrome and it almost had me using this as my main browser of choice but there is a few things that just plain do not work on this platform.

NAS Box

My Synology NAS Box uses a web front end to manage all aspects and one of the is the download manager which I use a lot as this offloads the grunt work of me grabbing big or slow files onto a standalone small box. The problem comes when adding some files, Google Chrome sticks on the adding page even though in the background the files are already been downloaded.

Gallery

The Gallery I host on this site allows me to add picture just plain sits there and eventually Chrome tells me it has stopped responding. This means if Chrome was the only browser of choice, I could not add any new pictures using the browser upload method.

Adverts

Chomre never did manage to fully block adverts and while I am more than happy to see the odd advert on a web page – when I head off to ustream or Justin.TV or even YouTube and get annoyed while the advert pops up inside the video I am watching – this is what annoys me. I am using the same AdBlock engine as the Firefox one and even the same lists yet still it does not block all.

What is good about it then?

Chrome starts fast, very fast and pages appear as soon as I click on that link. It can manage things crashing inside of the browser very well and it updates itself in the background. I want to like, I try to Like it but I am starting to sway back to Firefox I think. I do like the way of typing something right into the address bar and it searches. Time will tell I guess when Firefox 4 comes out.

I had a quick look to see if any progress was made over providing an actual adblocking tool for Google chrome and to my surprise the Firefox one is now ported across (in some shape or fashion) to chrome. The Extension can be added into Chrome and starts blocking adverts just like FireFox does. I tested it across various sites I just Know never worked before such as Justin.TV, YouTube and random other video related sites that inject adverts. The end result is now it all works – so back to chrome for the sheer speed – which is up to version 9 By the way).

There was a time I stood by Firefox as my browser of choice and when using at various places I work, it was frowned upon, I should be using IE after all right? Google Chrome came along and at first I failed to see the point of this browser and carried on using Firefox until 3.6 Series. I finally took a look at using Chrome on a daily basis and it *almost* managed to win me over while Firefox kept updating in the background.

Speed

One of the main problem I found with Firefox was speed or rather lack of it. From starting up the program then waiting while it loaded a page was slow, even on a Core i7 with 9GIG’s ram. One of the best things though about Firefox was a couple of extensions – Adblock Plus and Flash Downloader – these two allowed me to grab pretty much any video on the web as well as seeing ZERO Adverts – especially inside the likes of Ustream and Justin.TV.

Chrome by comparison though was very fast indeed, it would start instantly and no matter what page I chucked at the thing, it loaded. If Flash crashed on a page, you could restart just that page and by and large it was good.

Adverts

While there was an AdBlock for Chrome, it may well have stopped the normal adverts on the page but it failed to stop the adverts inside YouTube, Ustream and Justin.TV. These are the main adverts that in fact annoy me, your watching a stream or a video and up pops an advert. Do they seriously think I would rush off and buy that product?

Switching back

At first I thought I would use Firefox just for watching Live streams but as time went on, I used Chrome less and less and found Firefox workable in fact. I am hoping that Version 4 will be very good. Chrome for example at work fails to render the pages properly and sites such as Vodafone will not allow me to submit my Bill. I think these days people are making sure sites work with IE and Firefox, though I know one site that only works on Chrome due to the Author ‘Liking’ this browser the best – go figure.

If your a Fan of Firefox and own a Android or a Nokia N900 Phone – then your in Luck, there is a Beta version for you to try today. You can find out more HERE as well as download the latest nightly build. I shall be trying this and giving a much fuller report later but for now – you can check out the app yourself and report back your findings.

I had noticed a couple of problems when using my otherwise fine Firefox 3.6, one been the pause when you first go to a page and the other was the browser crashing when trying to view Justin.TV Archives function (when it got to the end of the segment).

I was tempted to try Google Chrome after everybody told me how good it was, faster, better and all round amazing. Could I take Chrome and make it my main browsing platform? Had it come a long way since I last tried it? Did it use a lot less memory and was it more secure?

The Past

While I had tried it some time ago and said how good it was (at the time), I was not happy that it did not know how to handle FTP Links inside web pages and when your trying to download drivers, this presents a big problem. I had not tried Chrome since and I guess was holding onto some past issues that were sorted a long time ago.

Plug-ins

There is a handful of things I need a browser to do, over and beyond your normal day to day browsing and if Chrome could not do this, then it had failed at the first hurdle. The first one I use would be Xmarks which sync’s your bookmarks to a central server along with your passwords if required. I had learned that there is now a version for all browsers. I also seen that now by default Chrome can sync your bookmarks to Gmail – so again, easy for me to share my bookmarks around the machines I use.

Adverts

I need to stress how much I hate any form of advertising, be it on the page, a pop up or even worse, inside a video I am watching. With Adblock plus on Firefox, I managed to block 99% of the adverts out there in any form and even block some of my own (home made web site adverts). I spotted Adblock+ and various other stuff for Chrome, so it was almost good to go.

Using Chrome

So we set off on our little adventure and started to use Chrome for everything that I do and this includes visiting Live Streams (Ustream / Justin.TV), watching YouTube and various other sites. The first problem was trying to watch Achieves on Justin made the browser crash as before – so this problem lay with Justin and not with what browser I use.

Watching a live stream and adverts were coming in inside the video but it had blocked the one’s on the page – funny enough these were google adverts! Are we suggesting that Google wont allow you to block there own adverts using there browser? I added the filters in to get the adverts gone but no matter what, they were there.

Pages not loading

Some pages let you do some stuff but the second you try and produce the result – such as Friend or Follow and it just sits there. A lot of pages were I was trying to download files made the thing just look around back to the front page and I struggled to even get some drivers from ATI because of this.

I tried my hardest

I wanted to love it, I wanted to say this was the browser for me and Firefox could be un-installed but eventually I could not stand the pain any longer. I removed Chrome and reverted back to Firefox. Once again I can browse without any adverts anywhere and all the pages work, all the links download as planned.

Just a heads up really, Firefox finally gets updated to version 3.6, adds Personas (Themes) and many speed improvements. Another one updated of late is is Avast - this is now at version 5, includes new voices and such. Seems the Auto Update fails to grab this new version so you are going to need to download and upgrade.

You know the problem, you love watching Ustream, Justin.TV and the many others streaming sites out there but in order to provide a Free Service to all – they plasters the page with adverts and this can get distracting. You want a way to get rid of these and view the page as it was intended? then read on..  

Without any software installed

As you can see form the screenshot taken above – we have an advert in the header (For Skype) and right there inside the video is yet another password, in the hope that a person might click them and make the site money. It can get worse then this with adverts opening over the top of the entire page, Justin.TV for example has a POPUP that comes up right as you enter a stream – so how do we get rid of this?

Step into the Mix Firefox & Adblock Plus

First you need to be using Firefox – once you have that running – go and grab Adblock Plus – choose a filter ste (i choose the top one) and you are now good to go. I have not seen an advert on any any of these sites for some time now – I am sure a couple might make it through but in all – they should now be gone.