Webupon

Loyal Internet Explorer (IE) fans stick to their browser no matter what. Opera fans and Firefox (FF) fans claim that their browser is the best. Apple and Mac fans go for Safari, but from what they say, it’s useless on Windows. Chrome is Google’s browser is built off of Safari’s rendering engine, but it doesn’t have any big fans as of yet.

The major things people seem to want from their browsers today are the 3 S’s – Speed, Size and Security. As a result, we’ll compare all three with each browser and determine the overall winner!

Browser Speed Comparison:

Rank #5:

Internet explorer is at the bottom. Its loading time is quite a bit slower than any of the other browsers. Microsoft calls it the fastest version yet, but IE 7 is actually even slower than IE 6.

Rank #4:

Opera isn’t too bad. It loads faster than IE, and has no problem with pages that contain flash or JavaScript, but it earned this spot just barely.

Rank #3:

Google Chrome also lost its lead by a very small amount, but in many cases will match the speed of Firefox.

Rank #2:

Firefox is the second best browser in terms of speed. Its speed blows IE clean away, and is good with loading both flash and JavaScript.

Rank #1:

Safari comes in number one. It too can be as fast as Firefox at times, but most of the time will load pages a bit faster.

Browser Size Comparison:

Rank #5:

Safari is the biggest browser. Apple’s browser for Windows is about 62 MB.

Rank #4:

Chrome, the newest browser out, is already the second largest browser in existence, at about 40 MB.

Rank #3:

The size for Firefox 3.0 will vary depending on the number of add-ons you have, but on average, it takes about 18 MB of disk space.

Rank #2:

Opera is a bit smaller than Firefox, coming in at around 16 MB.

Rank #1:

Internet Explorer doesn’t show its full size, but for IE 7 on Windows XP, it’s about 4 MB of disk space.

Browser Security Comparison:

Rank #5:

IE comes in DEAD LAST for security. It has so many security loopholes, it’s not even funny. Without IE, there wouldn’t be drive-by downloads. Also, IE 7 asks you to go out and install a phishing filter, when the rest of the browsers have them built in from the beginning.

Rank #4:

Chrome is still the baby here, so it hasn’t been tested on these things, but it should share the same problems as Safari, as they share the same rendering engine.

Rank #3:

Safari is the same as Chrome. It hasn’t really been tested on things such as drive-by downloads.

Rank #2:

Opera comes in second on the list. Its security is said to be very good.

Rank #1:

Firefox tops this one, with its huge community of people behind its open-source code identifying and fixing security holes. It checks each site with a database of known phishing websites and alerts you if it thinks the website could be harmful.

To conclude, Safari is the fastest browser, Internet Explorer 7.0 is the browser that’ll take up the least amount of space on your hard drive, and Mozilla Firefox is the most secure browser from hackers. Overall, I’d say Firefox is the best, but you should be the judge of which browser you would like to use. Just to help you decide, here’s a bit of extra information about each browser’s unique features.

All browsers have the tabbed browsing feature, which allows you to show many websites in one window. The days of having 12 web browser windows open are over.

Internet Explorer – External programs for interaction and toolbar support.

Google Chrome – You can drag each tab out to become its own window, and each tab runs as its own program, so if one tab crashes, the rest doesn’t go down with it.

Apple Safari – Private browsing means you can visit websites without passwords being saved, or them being logged to your history.

Opera – Said to have an add-on database similar to Firefox, but I’ve never seen it, as it couldn’t be found in the browser.

Mozilla Firefox – The Swiss army-knife of the browsers has a large community of thousands of free add-ons, such as themes, utilities to help you find things, and upgrades for enhancing your browsing experience.