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Browsers and Websites

In this article I’d like to clarify a couple of Internet related concepts which seem to be misunderstood by many.

Browsers: these are software applications that have the primary purpose of displaying websites and handling the interaction between the user and the websites. The most well known examples are:
- Internet Explorer (Which is a built-in, integral part of Windows)
- (Mozilla) Firefox
- Google Chrome
- Safari (Which is mainly on Mac but it exists for Windows based machines too)

Websites: these are places on the internet with their own address that provide some kind of content and, more recently, interaction with visitors via a web browser. So in order to visit and use a website you would need to have a, a working internet connection and b, a working browser. If either of them is missing or malfunctioning then you will have trouble visiting websites.

Quirks: The communication between websites and browsers are governed by a large number of standards. However, these standards are not always complete and not always completely clear, or they can even be misinterpreted on either end. The result is that some websites work well with certain browsers, but misbehaves with other ones.

For example: many real estate websites work only with Internet Explorer, because they were developed and tested only with that one browser. Another example: recently Yahoo mail seems to have some issues with Internet Explorer but it works fine with Firefox.

Internet Explorer (made by Microsoft) for a long time used to be the nightmare of website developers who wanted to create websites which worked with all browsers. It was because IE used its own set of standards which did not match with the approved Internet standards. Fortunately, it’s catching up nicely.

There’s a testing website which checks your browsers adherence level to standards. It’s called Acid3 test: acid3.acidtests.org
Firefox’s latest version passes it with a perfect score, earlier versions were close to 100%.
Google Chrome has a perfect score on it and was always close to it.
Internet Explorer had come a long way: IE7 had a measly 12%, IE8 had 20%, and IE9 has 95% on the test.
Safari’s latest version also has perfect score.
While a perfect score on the test doesn’t guarantee that websites will work flawlessly but it indicates a much better chance of that.

Conclusion

The gist of all these is that you will have a better web browsing experience in general if you use a non-Internet Explorer based browser. I worded it this way because there are “browsers” that actually rely on Internet Explorer to handle the pages. Examples of these are: AOL browser, AT&T/SBC/Yahoo browser (which is not maintained for years now).

You will also get less viruses if you avoid Internet Explorer. You can read that on online forums and our experience supports that too.

However, you don’t need to get stuck with one browser. If one website works with a particular browser better then you can just use that browser for that website. I use Firefox as my main browser, Google Chrome occasionally and once in a blue moon I visit a website with Internet Explorer.
Browsers are relatively small software so they won’t use up much storage on the hard drive if you install them.

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