As Internet Explorer 9 is just starting to show in our monthly browser statistics, I got to thinking about different browsers and their battle for Internet user dominance.
As the Editor of NZS.com, I spend a lot of time browsing the web. Personally, I’ve been a long term fan of Google Chrome. Chrome offers such a simple and clean user interface that you just seem to get much more ‘website’ for your money. The core focus of web browsers is to display websites so the more of a website that can be displayed in the window without large menu and title bars, the better.
Chrome also allows dragging of tabs from one monitor to another for those using dual monitors. I’ve tried a heap of different Internet browsers (more on them in our Website Resource ‘Web Browsers‘) but no other browsers seem to offer this function for the PC (although I’ve been informed by a fellow Twittererer that there are more options for Max users).
However, I have recently seen a lot more crashes and freezes on Chrome and have tried swapping to browsers such as Firefox and Safari but I keep ending up back on Chrome.
Which Internet browser are you using and what’s your second choice?
If I had to leave Chrome for good, I’d probably shift to Firefox. Firefox is the second most popular browser for NZS.com visitors and seems to be highly popular with developers due to its high functionality.
I also like Firefox’s right-click menu for images. You can easily set an image as your desktop background or block images from a website altogether – two functions that are missing from Chrome.
You can see the browser popularity over 2010 in terms of percentage of use for visitors to NZS.com on the chart in this post.
As you can see, Internet Explorer still reigns supreme (although is gradually declining) while Firefox (also declining) is second and Chrome and Safari are in a constant battle for third place.
Interestingly in this chart, only Chrome and Safari actually increased in popularity over 2010.
So what Internet browser are you using? Let us know on our Facebook Page.
For the first month since browser statistics tracking began, the internet browser Mozilla Firefox (often much favoured for its tabbed browsing, add-ons, security and stability) claimed over a 20% market share for net browsers at the end of 2008.
Mozilla remains the second most popular internet browser behind Internet Explorer, the current market leader by a long way with a 69.77% worldwide share. Apple’s Safari captures 7.13% of the market while other browsers Google Chrome, Opera and Netscape each have less than 1% shares.
Mozilla is toting this as a milestone for them as competitors for the big boys Microsoft. “It’s a huge achievement, one a few years ago most would have considered impossible” said Mozilla CEO John Lilly. “The open web is more vibrant than ever, and the thousands of Mozilla contributors around the world have played a major role in making it that way”.
In the next bid to Googlise the online world, Google launched the BETA version of its new browser Chrome
just hours ago. Contrary to many New Zealand reports, the new browser is now available for download – many New Zealand news stories have claimed it wasnt to be released until Thursday the 4th.
So what is new and different about the new Google browser? The NZS.com team’s first impression is that pages are loading faster than on other browsers, and the interface, while decidedly simple, is cohesive and easy to adapt to.
All of our settings were imported, and we love the fact that each individual tab runs itself with ‘crash control’ – so if one site causes problems the entire browser won’t need to close, just that tab.
Every time you open a new tab, you also get a ‘most visited’ page with screenshots of your most frequently visited sites and searches. A great novelty feature is the ‘incognito view’, meaning ‘what comes into this browser, stays in this browser’ – it’s stealth surfing made easy.
Creating, dragging and moving tabs and shortcuts is easy, and there’s no doubt that we’ll discover many more customisable beauties throughout Google Chrome’s first day of use.
If I had to leave Chrome for good, I’d probably shift to Firefox. Firefox is the second most popular browser for NZS.com visitors and seems to be highly popular with developers due to its high functionality.
For the first month since 
